Over the Ocean
by Punctuator
Summary: A prequel to "Red Lights": Tom Buckley and Margaret Matheson investigate inexplicable- and potentially monstrous- goings-on in a coastal town in Maine. Mystery, mayhem, and tragedy await. How long can you hold your breath...?
1. Prologue Part One: Robert

**RED LIGHTS: OVER THE OCEAN**

**Prologue Part One: Robert**

Her name was Anne. Anne Cassidy. Robert Buckley found out one day late in May when he tied up his Zodiac at Crow Island, five miles off the coast of southern Maine, climbed the slick stone stairs up the breakwater, and, following that, ascended the eighty-six steps up to the lantern room when Cassidy failed to answer the bell at the worn front door of the keeper's house.

She wasn't the first living being Buckley met on the island, though: as his head came level with the rocky, grass-stubbled ground at the head of the stairs, a massive black dog loomed suddenly and silently up in front of him. Buckley, surprised, nearly fell sideways off the narrow steps; he froze and fought simultaneously to keep his balance: the stairs at this time of day put at least twelve feet between him and the water slapping the jagged rocks below, and the fall would be a nasty one. But the dog simply went still, too, and stood watching him, not baring its teeth, not growling. Buckley recognized it as a Newfoundland. The thing stood a yard high at the shoulder if it stood an inch. He stepped cautiously from the stone stairs onto Crow Island proper; the dog surrendered a step backwards in turn, making way. It studied him a moment longer with its black eyes. Then, as if in response to a call Buckley couldn't hear, it turned and trotted toward the keeper's red-roofed, white-sided house. Buckley followed. The dog seated itself on the stony ground while Buckley rang the bell and then thumped the door with a fist; when the door went unanswered, it stood again and resumed its easy trot, this time toward the lighthouse itself, a granite-and-brick tower a hundred feet or so from the house.

Again, Buckley followed.

He found the tower's weathered steel door ajar; he pushed it all the way open and stepped inside and, finding no one in the lower-level staging area, called up the curving steel-mesh stairs: "Hello—?"

No reply. Buckley ascended the stairs. About twenty feet up, a porthole of a window facing out over the windswept Atlantic at his left elbow, he heard music. A violin solo, sweet and minor-keyed, against a backdrop of strings, winds, and continuo. Vivaldi, possibly. He continued climbing, called more loudly: "Hello—?"

The music stopped. A woman's voice echoed down the tower from the lantern room: "Come on up."

He found her kneeling on the floor at the lantern's gearbox, surrounded by tools, bits of machinery, greasy cans of lubricant, a battered portable CD player. She was in her mid-twenties, by the look of her, lean but not bony, her chestnut-brown hair tied back in a pony tail. She was dressed in a heathered gray henley, jeans, and boots, all equally sturdy, all equally worn. As Buckley stepped up into the lamp room, she toweled off with a rag, stood, and offered him a right hand still smudged generously with black grease. He took it. Her grip was wiry and strong.

"Hey, hello," she said, smiling a smile that seemed absolutely genuine for seeming absolutely unrehearsed. Guileless, Buckley thought, was the word. She wasn't apt to see too many strangers on the island. Her gaze was direct, her eyes a sparkling dark brown. For a moment, he simply looked back at her. For one thing, he was slightly winded. For another, the situation— the hound of the Baskervilles standing guard, the lighthouse, all of it— was well out of the ordinary. For a third, she was far prettier— no, make that far more beautiful— than he'd expected. Wideset eyes, sculpted, wind-freckled cheekbones, sensibly full lips free of lipstick or gloss.

"I'm Robert Buckley," he said at last. "We spoke on the radio."

"Right. You have papers for me to sign—?"

"Yeah, I— umm—" Buckley unzipped the inner pocket of his waterproof jacket. "Standard clearances—"

"Maybe I'd better wash up properly first, yeah?" She knelt again, proceeded to pack away her tools. "I'm Anne, by the way. Anne Cassidy."

"Nice to meet you, Anne." For a moment, watching her, Buckley got the impression that she'd forgotten he was there. Then he thought how, after a while, the mere presence of another human being wasn't enough to dispel isolation. "Aren't you afraid," he said, well enough aware that, despite his lack of height and brawn, his brown hair was far enough short of a cut and his early thirties face, though unconventionally handsome in its oddly high-cheekboned way, was far enough along in the growing of a beard to make for the look of a recently shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe, if not a lunatic (and one with eyes whose glass-blue a former girlfriend on her way to becoming an ex had labeled "freakish"), "being up here alone?"

"Book knows who to let up. He's a great doorman."

"Book?"

"You met him downstairs." Cassidy grinned as she straightened again. "If he hadn't approved, you'd be in bloody chunks on the jetty."

Buckley tried to smile back. "Sure."

#####

They descended. Cassidy, her work in the lamp room undoubtedly unfinished, left behind her tool bag and boombox; she said, as she led the way back down the curving stairs, "Sorry you had to climb all the way up."

"That's alright. It's good for the legs." Buckley kept his eyes on Cassidy's lithe back, not so much out of appreciation but out of a sense of vertigo. Nothing separated him from the space filling the tower. He kept a grip on the iron railing bolted to the tiled inner wall. "You make all the repairs to the lantern?"

"Pretty much. The problem is, the Coast Guard is for modernizing, the historical society that holds a one-third ownership in the island wants to keep things as they were in eighteen seventy-eight, the state is undecided, and between the three..."

"You have to make do."

"Exactly."

"But you're not a keeper by profession."

"Pardon?"

"You're not a lighthouse keeper by—"

"Oh. No. Oceanography. I'm about two semesters shy of my degree. I'm just here for the summer, making a few bucks. Soaking up atmosphere."

They reached the bottom of the stairs; Buckley followed Cassidy out the steel door. Book was waiting outside. He fell into step beside Cassidy as she led the way to the keeper's cottage.

"Soaking up salt air and engine grease, you mean...?" Buckley offered, following.

"What I get for having a knack with motors. I maintain the light and the horn, perform painting and make any other necessary repairs around the station, and monitor the current and weather reports. I read; I run. I play host to the odd sailboater or kayaker who ventures this far out. When it's not too rough or too cold, I swim." She reached, and opened, the door to the keeper's house. To the query or concern in Buckley's expression, Cassidy said: "Have my own lifeguard, don't I? Book. That's _his_ job. What he's bred for."

She went inside. Book stood aside to let Buckley pass. An area for the stowing and hanging of foul-weather gear and boots opened into a white-walled kitchen area; the kitchen, in turn, opened into a living area furnished with a worn maroon sofa, two shambling dun-colored easy-chairs, a coffee table, bookshelves packed with books, and a CRT television on a stand whose second shelf held a combo DVD-slant-video-cassette player. A bank of double-paned, insulated windows directly ahead of Buckley provided a view of the lighthouse at the island's northeast tip and the station's handful of red-roofed white outbuildings.

"Make yourself at home." Cassidy went to a washroom off the kitchen. To the splash and sputter of the tap as she scrubbed her hands, Buckley seated himself on a straight-backed wooden chair at the kitchen table and unfolded from his jacket the sheaf of papers requiring the signature of the lightkeeper of Crow Island. Book padded into the living area and lay on a worn green-weave rug at the back of the sofa. He laid his huge black head on his paws at an angle— half-turned Buckley's way— that suggested he was content to doze if the keeper's visitor would be good enough to mind his manners.

"Coffee—?" Cassidy asked, emerging from the washroom.

"Sure. Thanks."

At the kitchen tap, Cassidy filled the base of an old-fashioned two-stage glass percolator, spooned coffee into the topside filter, and lit the kitchen's stove with a stick match. She put the coffee on to boil and joined Buckley at the table. He slid the papers her way.

"'Happer Oceanographic,'" she read. "Makes a change from Woods Hole."

"We're the snotty young upstarts. Horning in on all that big research action."

Cassidy smiled, reaching for a pen among a handful standing in a blue stoneware mug at the table's center. She continued reading the top form, using the pen's tip as pointer. "Bio-luminescent algae," she said. "This far north?"

"Yeah. Indicative of warming trends in local ocean currents." He added, as Cassidy raised her eyebrows: "Thrilling, I know."

"All part of the bigger climatological picture, isn't it?" Cassidy signed the top form, the two others beneath it. "At least it doesn't bite."

"Nope. I prefer the little guys." Buckley grinned. "Leave the great whites to Spielberg. I'll take the stuff that fits under a microscope."

Cassidy chuckled. "That's funny. I know someone who'd disagree. Or at least he'd insist he'd disagree. Dick Tulley, local fisherman, supposed shark-hunter. He runs the supply boat out here."

"He's hunting great whites? This far north?"

"I suspect it really translates into 'thresher-with-an-attitude.' But, hey, I'm only a student: what do I know?" Cassidy separated the copies she would need to retain for the station's records, re-stacked and straightened the remaining papers, and handed them back to Buckley. "There you are, Dr. Buckley. You now have permission from Anne Cassidy, acting on behalf of the Keeper's Service of the Coast Guard of the state of Maine, to gather biological samples in and around the littoral vicinity of Crow Island."

Buckley folded the papers and zipped them back into his pocket. "On behalf of the Happer Institute, Keeper Cassidy, many thanks."

He looked across the table at her. Their eyes met. Met and held. For a second, Buckley thought he saw more than windburn in the coloring of Cassidy's cheeks.

From the stove came a burbling sound.

Cassidy looked away. She got up. "Coffee's ready," she said.

#####

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To be continued...


	2. Prologue Part Two: Anne

**Prologue Part Two: Anne**

Like many men for hours alone on or near great expanses of water, Robert Buckley took to musing. One such musing, centered on the keeper of the light on Crow Island, asked what would draw a woman such as Anne Cassidy, outwardly friendly and open, undeniably attractive, to a posting on a slab of rock in the cold Atlantic. That train of wondering Buckley kept to himself. The question he voiced to Cassidy, after he spotted nothing but whirling, squawking gulls over two weeks of setting and retrieving catch-strainers in and from the water around the island, was more prosaic, and certainly less personally intrusive:

"Who thought of calling this place Crow Island?"

On that day, he was sitting on the jetty, Book patiently offering his services as a backrest. Cassidy was kneeling beside them with the guts of the motor from the island's open launch splayed out around her. Tune-up time. Time, too, for a bottle of pale ale, slightly against Coast Guard regulations but absolutely essential to such a warm, breezy June afternoon.

Cassidy replied, reaching for a socket wrench, "I'm thinking someone spotted a black guillemot, and 'crow' was easier to spell."

"Not to mention, 'Gull Island' was already taken."

"'Rock Island,' too."

Buckley sipped his beer. "Why 'Devil's Island,' then...?"

"The penal colony, or the Devil's Island out there?" Cassidy, following Buckley's line of sight, pointed seaward, to the northeast, with her socket wrench.

"The one out there."

Eight miles from the coast, three miles from Crow Island, Devil's Island, a jagged, unbuildable crown of rock jutting some sixty feet above the waves, was the point farthest oceanward in Buckley's sample-collection route.

"The caves," Cassidy said. "In winter, especially, they say the wind howls like a demon through the sea caves."

In the warm sunshine, Buckley suddenly found himself shuddering. He frowned at Cassidy. "_Who_ says...?"

Cassidy scrunched a smile back at him. "Don't tell me the Macready's Point chamber of commerce neglected to bombard you with tourist pamphlets when you came to town. Local lore: the area's crawling with it."

"Guess I don't look enough like a tourist."

"Guess not." Cassidy added, quietly, still smiling, as she turned her attention back to her engine parts: "Vagabond."

"I heard that."

"Heard what...?"

Buckley looked off the edge of the jetty. "I could throw you in."

"You could _try_."

Almost seriously, he asked: "You don't like the beard...?"

The smile left Cassidy's face. But the friendliness behind it remained. She replied, keeping her dark eyes focused on her work: "I should get this motor reassembled before dusk."

#####

#####

Two days later, the sunshine was gone. It was as though June had given way directly to November. The wind gusted from the northeast, the rain sluicing from the troubled gray clouds seemed ridiculously close to turning to snow, and on an afternoon that Buckley would much sooner have spent in the shore-side laboratory facilities the Happer Institute shared with the University of Maine, taking notes and examining tiny glowing plants through the lensed barrel of a microscope, he found, according to his schedule, that he was due to be out gathering samples from his catch-strainers.

"I'm taking the Zodiac, Steve," he called, leaving the lab and passing the glass inner walls of a row of four closet-sized offices. The Aquarium, everyone called it. All but one of the offices were dark; Dr. Steven Costas ("Costco" to his friends, and even to Buckley, interloper though he was) scooted his office chair the two feet it took to reach the open door of his work-closet and leaned his black-haired head into the passage.

"Where were you planning on ending up on a day like today, Buckley?" he asked. "Australia?"

"It won't be that bad, will it?"

The expression on Costas's face was only half-joking. His eyes were wholly serious. "Do you have any next of kin?"

"Only my brother Tom—" Buckley found himself hesitating. Whatever smile he might have been attempting dissipated as Costas met his eyes. "It's in my personnel file, Steve," he said. "I'll be back in a couple of hours."

"Sure." Costas's expression lightened, though his dark eyes through their steel-framed corrective lenses remained too directly focused for Buckley's liking. "Be careful out there, Bob. The islands get tricky when the wind's up."

######

By the time Buckley had mustered his gear and his jacket, anticipation had conjured hurricanes in his mind; consequently, the reality was tame, if uncomfortable, cold, and wet, by comparison. He headed north first, bound for the relative sandiness of Gull Island, then Rock Island after that, where the strainers were, indeed, once again snagged in the rocks. Muller's Island, farther out but rounding back southward, was next; Buckley, blinking salt spray from his eyes, his hair slicked back from his forehead, was only too glad to turn his back on the icy blowing rain.

Then came Devil's Island, and the Zodiac's motor failed.

Or not _failed_. Not entirely. Not yet. As Buckley approached the south side of the island, and the spiking waves lapsed into relatively sheltered calm, a sputter insinuated itself into the motor's powerful roar. According to the gauges, nothing was overheating; the fuel tank was over half full. Still, the sputtering was there, and becoming more apparent by the minute, and Buckley had no desire to end up adrift in weather like this. He collected his samples quickly and got underway.

Initially, he thought of doing the obvious thing: heading back to the docks outside the Happer research facility.

Then, maybe half a mile from Devil's Island, the motor stopped cold.

"Shit—" Buckley whispered. Why he whispered, he didn't know. _As if the wind could hear._ He shivered as rainwater trickled beneath the blown-back hood of his jacket and made rivulets between his shoulder blades. Then, that quickly, the wind had the boat. A wave spun the Zodiac half-sideways on its slithering, surging back.

"Shit. Damn it. Shit—"

Buckley, acutely aware, now, that the samples might well have waited until tomorrow and that he'd picked a less-than-optimal locale for his first time working solo at sea, mentally ran through the emergency procedures for restarting the engine. He took the first, most-obvious step and reached for START—

Before his fingers touched the button, the engine coughed back to life.

Buckley opened the throttle and headed for the mainland. A hundred yards along, the motor began to cough again. It kept running, but Buckley could hear— and feel— a grinding hitch in its workings. And he could feel it losing power. Already the wind was pushing the Zodiac laterally.

He was some seven miles out. Optionally, Crow Island was roughly two miles to the southwest. Cassidy had her foul-weather duties to attend to and was under no obligation to keep him entertained, but, if nothing else, Buckley could hole up in the keeper's house and read until the wind died down. He pointed the Zodiac's black snub prow toward the lighthouse and gunned the motor.

#####

As the lighthouse and the cliff it stood atop, a sheer stone face at least sixty feet high, loomed over the Zodiac, the motor died again.

This time, it wouldn't restart.

A wave lifted the Zodiac as Buckley tried to fit the oars; the cliff and the sharp piling of huge rocks at its base were brought suddenly, sickeningly closer on an inexorable hiss of water. Buckley got the oars into the locks, but the width of the boat made for clumsy rowing at best. The blades barely caught hold in the roiling water. Another sliding wave, and the cliff was twenty feet closer than before, then closer still. Buckley thought of shouting for help, but he knew the wind and the water would swallow his voice as effectively as any nightmare. He faced the cliff and braced his back and rowed for all he was worth. In less than a minute, he and the Zodiac would hit the rocks.

To his left, then, and ahead, the sound of a motor cut through the rainy wind. The keeper's open white launch rounded the tip of the island. Cassidy, in a yellow slicker, was at the helm; Book was standing in the bow. She drew alongside the Zodiac, at a distance of about twenty feet, and idled the engine while she quickly tied a stern line.

"Tie off," she called. "I'll tow you in."

She threw Buckley the free end of the rope. At that moment, another wave lifted the Zodiac; Buckley, reaching for the catch, nearly fell out. As it was, the rope end landed in the water, and the Zodiac was carried fifteen feet closer to the rocks.

"Book—!" Cassidy snapped. "Rope!"

Book launched himself into the waves. He swam for the rope end, caught it in his jaws, and headed for the Zodiac. Buckley, numb with fear and wonderment, took the rope from the dog's huge jaws and tied it to the tow-loop in the Zodiac's prow. Before he could call back to Cassidy, to ask what he could or should do to help Book back to the launch, a wave roiled up and tipped the Zodiac nearly on its side.

Buckley fell overboard.

The water was a cold shock, a full-body icy slap. Buckley went under. Too far under: just below the surface ran a rocky island current, and as he opened his eyes to salty, churning, panicking darkness, it took hold of him and pulled. Buckley, less than a lungs'-worth of air in his body, found himself submerged and flailing. Until something caught hold of his hood and tugged from above.

Book.

Buckley surfaced, choking and gasping, his jacket collar gripped tight in the dog's jaws. Book held him steady until Buckley could catch hold of the Zodiac. He got his numbing fingers around one of the boat's side-lines and held on.

"Ready?" Cassidy shouted.

Buckley coughed back: "Ready—!"

He wondered, as Cassidy steered them clear of the rocks and the cliff, how Book was going to make his way to safety. He needn't have worried. His head held well clear of the water, the dog swam powerfully after them. The whole thing might well have been a game to him. When they reached the jetty, he loped up the stone stairs and stood topside, legs braced, and shook a huge arc of spray into the wind. Buckley, shuddering with cold, went to help Cassidy tie up the boats.

She warned him off with a shake of her head. "You're wet through. Get yourself up to the house and get out of those clothes. You can use the shower upstairs."

#####

He found the shower, or the shower he assumed Cassidy meant, in a bathroom at the far end of an upstairs hallway in the keeper's house. In a linen closet opposite the bathroom, he found towels and a rough pine-green blanket. He washed the salt from his body and hair, but the heat of the water was unable to reach all the way to the chill in his bones; he dried himself and wrapped himself in the blanket, gathered up his wet clothes, and went back downstairs. Cassidy had yet to come in. Buckley looked around. At the far right of the living area he found a communications area: a PC, shipping books and charts, a shortwave radio, other equipment. Then, through the washroom off the kitchen, where Cassidy had scrubbed her hands the day they met, he discovered a laundry room. It wasn't presumptuous of him, he figured, to wash his clothes or, having started a load of laundry, to put through a call on the station's radio to the research institute, to let Steve Costas know that he hadn't been lost at sea.

Still, he couldn't get warm. When Cassidy finally came in, followed by Book, Buckley was huddled, blanket-wrapped, against the upholstered arm at one end of the sofa.

"Are you alright?" she asked.

"Yeah. It's just— I'm still cold."

"You're probably in shock." Jacket off, boots still on, Cassidy disappeared into the washroom-slant-laundry room, emerged a moment later with a dark blue blanket and a stack of assorted worn towels. The blanket she handed to Buckley. With the towels, she roughly and affectionately dried off Book.

"There's soup, if you want something hot," she said.

"That's okay." Buckley gestured at the second blanket, now wrapped around his chest and shoulders. "This is helping, thanks."

"You're welcome."

Buckley watched her towel Book's massive shoulders. "Did he come with the job?"

"No, he's mine." Cassidy paused in her work to scratch Book's jowls. "About two years ago, I was this close to adopting a beagle, and then something told me I absolutely had to have a Newfie. It was almost like a voice in my head. He was sixteen months old when I got him from the rescue."

"Why 'Book'?"

Cassidy smiled, shrugged. "That's what it said on the card. He answered to it, and it seemed to suit him, so we kept it."

"I think it was a smart decision. All around."

"I think so, too."

Cassidy made a nest of dry towels on Book's rug behind the sofa; dry enough, Book lay down. Cassidy stroked his head; Buckley only just heard her murmur: "That's my boy. That's my good, good boy."

Then she straightened, went to deposit the wet towels in the laundry room, and removed her boots in the house's entryway. She joined Buckley at, but not on, the sofa.

"As for tonight," she said to him, "I can't leave the island. The regulations say I can't lend you the launch. And that Zodiac isn't going anywhere. Dick Tulley will be by in the morning. He'll take you back to the mainland."

"I understand." Buckley looked up at her. "Thank you. And Book. Thank you for everything."

Cassidy paused. When she spoke again, a quiet tone of anger had entered her voice. "You should have been wearing a life jacket." Almost absently, almost wonderingly, she reached for him. Her fingertips brushed Buckley's bearded cheek. "You could have drowned."

Buckley replied, simply: "You saved me."

Cassidy frowned at him, blinking harshly, suddenly, at the tears, not the sea-spray salt, in her eyes; she leaned down, toward him, and Buckley met her in the kiss. Cassidy took Buckley's face in her hands, kissing him more deeply, and he drew her down with him, onto the sofa.

After a time, following the preliminaries, the initial acts of tender, hungry desperation, they moved their lovemaking, minus both of his blankets and most of her clothing, to the keeper's room on the house's second floor; in a comfortable wide old bed some hours later, Robert Buckley, finally warm, and content and pleasantly exhausted besides, dozed off gazing languidly into Anne Cassidy's sparkling dark eyes.

#####

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His mind told him, from the depths of a dream, that Cassidy had changed, and drastically; Buckley, spooned against something warm and deeply furred, woke to find himself with his left arm spanning Book's side. The dog was snoring softly in his sleep. Smiling, Buckley rolled onto his back. The steel bedside lamp was illuminated; on the table, at the lamp's base, was a note written in pencil on yellow steno paper.

_I'm in the light,_ it said.

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**A/N:** Next up, things get creepy. Thanks for reading— and don't touch that dial...


	3. Prologue Part Three: The Light

**Prologue Part Three: The Light**

When Buckley next woke, he was alone in the keeper's bed. Cool light filled the room, like a pale hangover of last night's storm. Buckley's stomach rumbled, drew him as if by gastrointestinal will up and sitting: he could smell cooking, salty, sweet, and savory, and he hadn't eaten since grabbing a cold-cuts sandwich in his cabin before heading in to work early yesterday afternoon. He was starving.

His clothes, clean and dry, were folded at the end of the bed. He dressed, rinsed his mouth at the white porcelain sink of the bathroom where he'd showered the night before, and, following his nose and his belly, walked in his stocking feet down to the kitchen.

Cassidy was at the stove, tending a griddle full of pancakes. Black coffee was burbling in the percolator on the right-side back burner. Book sat nearby, his black eyes focused with patient intent on a plate of crisp bacon strips on the countertop to Cassidy's right. He looked, for just a second, Buckley's way, as Buckley leaned into the wide doorframe marking the boundary between the living area and the kitchen; Cassidy noted the dog's movement, however slight it might have been, and said in Buckley's direction:

"Good morning."

"Good morning." Buckley joined Cassidy at the stove, put his hands on her hips, leaned around to kiss her jaw.

She smiled. "Sleep well?"

"Mm hm." Buckley shifted her dark hair, for now hanging loosely around her shoulders, and pressed his lips to the warm soft skin of Cassidy's neck.

"Wait. Wait—" Cassidy eased clear. She turned off the burner beneath the griddle, plated the pancakes on a chipped white serving dish. Then she turned to Buckley, slid her arms around his neck, and kissed him deeply.

"Mmm—" Like flipping a switch. His belly, for the moment, quit its complaining. As his mouth melded with hers, Buckley got Cassidy in his arms, lifted her onto a clear spot on the counter. She wrapped her jeaned legs around his waist, drew him closer.

"What time does that Dick Tulley normally get here...?" Buckley asked, caressing Cassidy's lower back, gently rubbing his groin against hers.

"About eight-thirty, give or take," a man's voice replied. "Dependin' on the weather."

Still embracing Cassidy, still embraced in turn, Buckley froze. The man standing just inside the entryway was tall, broad, fair-haired. Age-wise, he might have been anywhere from forty-five to sixty. He was wearing a navy rain jacket over a brown cable-knit sweater, oil-stained khaki work pants, brown leather boots. His eyes were keen and blue in a weathered hawkish face, and he was casually eating from the plate of bacon, now held by its rim between the fingertips of his left hand.

Richard Tulley tossed Book a slice of bacon. The dog's jaws clopped shut over it in midair. Tulley fixed his keen eyes nonchalantly but slyly on Buckley and Cassidy and took another slice of bacon for himself. "Not that I mind a bit of a show with my breakfast."

#####

They ate, the four of them, Book now chomping kibble from a steel bowl in the entryway. Afterward, while Cassidy tied her hair back into its workaday pony tail, and she and Tulley discussed the storm, the forecast, the area's shipping schedule, and the Crow Island light station in general, Buckley washed the dishes. He helped Cassidy and Tulley carry supplies up from Tulley's boat, a decked white lobster-rig-slant-trap-setter bearing the name _Fallen Angel_, presently tied up at the jetty behind the island's open launch. Then, after a tow line had been tied between the _Fallen Angel_ and the crippled Zodiac, while Tulley looked discreetly eastward at the waves rolling toward the island and the Maine coast ahead of the morning wind, Buckley and Cassidy said a quick, tender goodbye.

"I'll be back Wednesday," Buckley said. "If that's okay."

It was presently Monday. Cassidy brushed wind-caught hair from his eyes, leaned up the few inches it took to kiss him. "I'll be waiting. Stay safe."

#####

On the choppy ride back to Macready's Point, Buckley found his attention drifting back eastward, toward the lighthouse and the sun trying to push powder-white light through the misty clouds. He turned to look farther north, toward Devil's Island, thinking, for just a second, he could hear, above the gurgling roar of the _Fallen Angel_'s engines, a sound similar to the shrieking of gulls.

Tulley noted where he was looking. "The islands can be tricky," he said.

In the second Buckley stopped focusing on it, the distant shrieking vanished, became lost in the wind and the rhythmic slap of the waves against the _Fallen Angel_'s hull. "You're not the first one to tell me that."

"I won't be the last. Got a couple of kayakers gone missing only last month."

"Missing?"

"Up too early from the cities, I figure. The air warms, the sun stays up a bit longer, and people think it's summer. But we've got some deep spots hereabouts, and the currents run cold. The ocean doesn't always give up her dead. Last anyone heard— they left messages for their friends, back in Boston— they were heading out to Devil's."

"And you never found them."

"We found the kayaks."

Buckley went silent. A shiver, like a ghost of the icewater trickles from yesterday, in the rain, rippled up his back.

Tulley glanced his way, arched his brushy eyebrows. He nodded sternward, toward the Zodiac, towed and bouncing in their wake. "Care t' tell me what happened with your boat?"

"It stopped. The motor stopped dead. About half a mile from Devil's Island. It picked up a stutter when I was about an hour out." Buckley shrugged, recalling. "It just quit. Then it started up again."

"Motor's don't just suddenly start up again. You dropped to a low idle, and she caught her breath and powered back up." Tulley shook his head when Buckley looked ready to argue. "You'll want someone t' look at her. My cousin's the one you want."

"It's— That's kind of you to offer. But the Zodiac is institute property."

"Maintained by the fellas in the university's boat shop: am I right?"

"Yeah. But—"

"Some of the local boys aren't above having a bit of fun at you college fellas' expense. I'm guessing one of 'em sanded your fuel."

"I'm not from the university. I'm with the research institute."

"Some of the local boys aren't likely to see the distinction. My cousin's your man."

Buckley stared at Tulley with angry incredulity. "What they did— _if_ they did it— I could have been left adrift. I could have drowned."

"But you weren't, and you didn't." Tulley added, with a wink: "And it put you on Annie Cassidy's best side, didn't it?"

Buckley looked away, scowling, and turned his bearded blush into the cool gusting breeze.

#####

Nothing outwardly (or inwardly) was wrong with the Zodiac's motor: thus declared Peter Tulley, a few years younger, and about a third smaller, than his cousin, but otherwise Richard Tulley's exact-enough copy.

"Chalk it up to bad fuel," he told Buckley. "I'll get after the institute to have their tanks checked."

#####

A week went by, then two, and Buckley had no further trouble with the Zodiac. The institute, admonished either by Tulley or by his cousin Peter, duly checked, cleaned, and re-filled the fuel tanks at the boat shop. Buckley collected his samples, studied his tiny glowing plants through the lens of his microscope in the Happer Institute's lab, and spent a bit more time than was absolutely necessary to his research in the company of the keeper of the light on Crow Island.

When he wasn't collecting, studying, or socializing with Anne Cassidy (in the best and most-carnal use of the phrase), Buckley sometimes went running. The area was lined with trails, courtesy of the state's park system; but as the sun retreated over the jaggedly fir-pointed tops of the hills west of town, Buckley preferred to run on the beach, a strip of sand arcing across the water's edge of a shallow cove just north of the institute and the lights of Macready's Point.

One day, at dusk, Buckley passed a woman midway along his run on the beach. She was stocky and middle-aged, with short, tending-to-salt hair; she was wearing a blue track suit with white piping along the legs and sleeves; she was standing at the hissing edge of the surf, facing out to sea. Buckley, passing, assumed she was meditating or doing yoga; she offered no greeting, and Buckley said nothing in turn.

On his return lap, she was still there. As Buckley approached, she turned his way and asked: "Don't you hear them?"

Buckley trotted to a halt. In the fading light, the heavy serge blue of nightfall creeping in across the eastern water, he nonetheless recognized the woman as a waitress from the Anchor Cafe, Macready Point's main-street diner.

Buckley, a bit breathless, could hear nothing but the surf, the low rumble of the sand-bottomed waves. "Hear who?" he replied, understandably confused.

The woman, he noted, was looking toward the islands, now invisible in the mounting darkness. Gull, Rock. Muller's.

And Devil's.

The woman merely smiled. "Good evening to you, Dr. Buckley." She turned back to the water, her expression again becoming focused and intent. Listening.

#####

Buckley, post-run, post-shower, mentioned her that night to Stephen Costas and a few of the other men and women he'd befriended at the institute, over a beer in The Shallows, a local watering-hole. One of the scientists from the University of Maine, a woman by the name of Jessica Brand, fortyish, long-limbed, and ash-blonde, who took a fair if undeserved amount of ribbing from her colleagues for specializing in clams ("Don't let 'em give you the slip, Jessie!" and variations being regularly Post-It-noted to her chair or computer monitor in her office in The Aquarium), looked into her foam-laced glass and muttered: "Damn it. Not again."

The table went quiet. Buckley looked around, saw expressions ranging from bemusement on the part of his Happer Institute fellows to what seemed almost like a sort of fear in the eyes of those who might classify themselves as locals. Before he could say anything, Costas hoisted the emptier of the table's two plastic pitchers and, looking across the room toward the bar, hollered to one of the waitresses: "What's the holdup, Ellie? We're running dry over here!"

He turned back to the others with a grin. "The service around here, I swear..."

Reaching for his own glass, Buckley swallowed his questions with a bitter-smooth mouthful of beer.

#####

Later, back in the institute-campus cabin assigned as his living quarters, Buckley called his younger brother— younger by six minutes, that was— Tom, for the first time in nearly a year. Tom Buckley was a physicist with a teaching post at a university in New York state (which university, Buckley, somewhat to his shame, wasn't quite sure, as Tom had been in the process of possible relocation the last time they'd spoken); aside from his degreed area of study, he had something of an interest in the unusual, the out-of-the-ordinary, even the paranormal.

After six rings and a moment of uncertainty, during which he wondered if he had, in fact, forgotten his brother's number, Buckley got Tom's answering machine, the perfunctory greeting in Tom's flat voice, the invitation to leave a message following the tone.

Buckley heard himself chatter pointlessly and nervously into the silence on the line— "How are you...?", "I'm fine.", bits and pieces about his research, where he was, how long he expected to be there— and then, not knowing how much time he had left before the machine cut him off, he talked about the woman he'd spoken with that night on the beach:

"...weird," he said, "but it struck me: like that Moby song. 'God Moving Over the Face of the Waters.' You remember that one, Tom? Something odd is going on up here, I think. Thought it sounded like something you might be—"

A prickling moved up the back of Buckley's neck. He stopped, suddenly aware of the stillness in his cabin. Or had he heard something? On the line, in the whisper of the firs outside, was someone— or something— listening to him?

"Never mind, Tom," he said into the phone. "Hope you're keeping. Take care, okay? Bye."

He hung up. Listened. The soft rumble from the compressor in the cabin's ancient refrigerator. The music from the clock radio in the bedroom, currently tuned to the university's satellite feed, broadcasting a mix of indie tunes far and wide. Buckley breathed out. He reviewed his next day's schedule and got ready for bed.

#####

That selfsame next day, as night again crept in from the east, Robert Buckley eased reluctantly out of a bed that wasn't his. Time for both him and Anne Cassidy to get to— or back to— work. A variation in schedule: he was due to check his catch-strainers that night; Cassidy, in turn, needed to brace the station for a squall that could be heading for the coast.

"Try to be on dry land by twenty-two-thirty, okay?" she said, her dark gaze like a caress on his bare skin as Buckley got up.

"Okay," he replied, turning back, leaning down to kiss her.

When their lips parted, Cassidy kept her eyes on his. "I love you."

It caught Buckley slightly off-guard, but only slightly: in all reality, it had been coming, he thought, since the first time they kissed that night on the sofa, following his near-drowning and Book hauling him from the depths. "I love you, too," he replied. He caressed Cassidy's cheek, nuzzled her throat. He could feel her pulse, steady and strong, beneath his lips. "See you tomorrow."

#####

He set out, as the sun's uppermost edge slipped below the western hills, on his oceangoing rounds. Tanner's Island, to the south of Crow, gave up its glowing treasure; the strainers off Crow Island itself he'd already checked on his way out.

The catch by the sea-caves of Devil's Island was missing. Buckley brought the Zodiac to a slow idle where the trap's marker buoy should have been. Nothing. He scanned the surface, shone a lantern into the waters covering the rock shelf that surrounded the island. He saw it, finally: a greenish glow from too far down. _Damn_, thought Buckley._ It sank_.

By his estimation, the trap was roughly fifteen feet beneath the surface. Just out of easy, safe reach. Buckley gauged his surroundings, his situation. The weather was still calm; he was in fairly shallow water. Time for a quick dive. He anchored the Zodiac; he opened the boat's equipment locker, slipped on his dive-vest, the mini-tank and fins, checked his regulator. He was aware of the risks: he was alone; it was getting dark; a storm was due. Tomorrow, if he chose to tell Cassidy what he'd done, she'd no doubt give him at least one full barrelful of hell. But Buckley, so newly in love, loved even her criticism. Anyway, this would only take a minute. He lowered himself over the side of the Zodiac, sloshed water into his goggles and put them on, and dove toward the glow...

... which was not the catch-strainer. Or not _just_ the strainer, anyway. He couldn't see exactly what it was. It seemed to recede as he approached. Puzzled, Buckley went deeper, following it—

— and then something fleshy and sinuous wrapped around his left ankle. Pulled. Buckley was yanked downward. His heartbeat spiked, but he kept his mouthpiece in place. He was hauled forward, then, through the water. Level with his head, a rocky outcrop loomed suddenly into the light of his dive lamp. He threw out his arms, tried to kick away—

Impact. Everything went black.

#####

#####

#####

Buckley woke.

His eyes opened on pitch-darkness. He was lying on rock; he was cold and damp. His head hurt; his right temple was stinging; he touched it, hissed in pain, felt a sticky wetness.

The air was dank. A rotting smell filled his nostrils, a sickly sweet smell, too. His mouthpiece was still clamped between his teeth; he numbly took it out, to the protest of his cramped jaws. His goggles were gone. So was his hand-lamp. But there was a light on his vest; Buckley stood, cautiously, not knowing how much clearance he had, and switched it on.

He found himself in a charnel house. A cavern, maybe twelve feet high, at least thirty feet across. In it were bones. Bones everywhere. Of fish, animals, cetaceans, and... humans. Buckley, looking into the empty eyes of a skull, nearly cried out in panic and revulsion.

He steadied himself. Tried to will himself calm. There were manmade fixtures around him, too, in addition to the bones. Not bars, not cages. Storage racks, possibly the fittings of what might have been a rudimentary lab, all rusting. On his left, and lining the inner wall of the cavern, fifty-gallon barrels of something, corroded from the ground up. And, from the darkness ahead of him, beyond the barrels, beyond the bones, a scuttling sound. Claws on stone, approaching from the blackness outside the reach of Buckley's lamp, far back in the cave. And then—

He'd never seen anything like them. A new species of crab, maybe, but narrower-bodied, like lobsters. And big: two feet long or better, front to back. They were a glistening black, the surge of their segmented backs, their articulated pincers, highlighted like a creeping nightmare in the glow of Buckley's dive lamp. Buckley stared in horror: a dozen of the things or more were approaching from the depths of the cave.

As the creatures focused their attention his way— food he was, new, fresh food: _that_ he realized— that close to shock and shaking with fear, pain, and cold, Buckley moved slowly away, mindful of his footing (he still wore his flippers, and he didn't want to waste time pulling them off), toward the barrels. There was water behind him, to his right. A pool, of unknowable depth, beneath the stone ceiling of the cavern. He edged toward it. The creatures came nearer, their claws clicking on the slimy stone floor of the cave—

And stopped. Hesitated, their pincers waving Buckley's way, as if they were testing the air. As if they'd encountered an invisible barrier of some sort. Buckley shone his lamp toward the floor of the cave between himself and the things. Blackness. Or blackness on top of blackness. Some of the barrels had begun to leak a viscous substance like crude oil. Buckley bent, touched it, sniffed his fingertips, and discovered the source of the sweet smell. The stuff was sticky. Mildly corrosive, by the feel of it. But, whatever it was, the black crab-creatures wouldn't come near it.

Buckley smeared the stuff on himself, on his chest and arms and legs, his hair and face. To his right, rotting steel stairs led downward, into the pool. The water smelled of brine. His regulator was broken; his air tank was empty. It was deadweight now: he took it off, dropped it to the cave floor. Still, he had his light... and if this was where the ocean was coming in, this was where he would have to make his exit. Buckley descended the stairs to neck-depth, took and exhaled three deep breaths, took one last, lung-filling breath, and dove.

#####

Possibly fifteen feet down, at the far side of the pool, Buckley found an opening: a hole, roughly five feet square, cut into the rock. Stumps of rusted steel bars were embedded in it, top and bottom. The remnants of a grate. Buckley, cautious of the jagged metal, swam through the opening; by the light of his vest-lamp, he made his way through a square-sided tunnel, also cut from the rock. Twenty feet. Thirty. Buckley's lungs, ill-assisted by the terrified pounding of his heart, began to ache. Fifty feet—

Another opening, the wreckage of another gate, dead ahead. Buckley swam through, into open water, and, his lungs now burning, began to ascend.

Twenty seconds later, a miracle: he surfaced.

He was nearly back where he'd been when his nightmare began. The Zodiac was less than twenty feet away from him, bobbing peacefully at anchor, right where he'd left it. The wind and the water were still fairly calm. But— God damn it— fog was rolling in from the sea.

Buckley heaved himself into the Zodiac, shed his fins and his dive-vest; his heart pounding, he hoisted the anchor and pressed the starter. The motor roared to life. Buckley checked his compass headings and set off through the deepening murk for Crow Island.

He was less than a minute into his voyage when the horn from the island— it would be a six-second blast every forty seconds, Cassidy had told him— moaned out over the water. Buckley was riding too low in the fog to see the station's light. But if he kept to his headings and followed the sound of the horn, he could—

Something struck the propeller. Hard. The Zodiac's motor choked and died; Buckley was nearly thrown out of the boat. He regained his balance, jabbed the START button. Nothing. He fitted the oars, started to row. The Crow Island horn moaned at his back. It was as if he could feel the sound in his spine.

A minute later, the left oar was torn from his hand.

A second after that, something huge hit the Zodiac from underneath.

The boat overturned. Buckley was pitched into the water. He clawed his way to the surface, started to swim in the direction the Zodiac had been going.

Before the Crow Island horn sounded again, something yanked hard at his left ankle. Harder than the first time, before the horrors of the cavern. Pain seared up Buckley's leg. He cried out as the water closed over his head—

The grip on his leg loosened. Buckley surfaced, gasping and choking. "Anne—!" he shouted. His voice was swallowed by the long, forlorn bellow of the foghorn. When the sound died, he shouted again: "Anne— Oh, God— help—"

Another yanking. This time, at his waist. As if a giant clawed hand had closed around him. Crushing him. Buckley was dragged downward, into cold and darkness, all-encompassing agony, and, for just a second, as water filled his lungs, a sudden, still clarity. _I'm in the light, _he thought. Cassidy's note. Yellow steno paper on the table beside her bed. The words were there, in her clear, clean handwriting, in his mind. _I'm in the light. _The one thing we cannot comprehend is the moment of our own death: Robert Buckley might have thought that, but he didn't. Not then, not ever again. _I'm in the light. I'm in the light. I'm in the—_

#####

#####

#####

**... END PROLOGUE**


	4. Chapter One: Margaret and Tom

**A/N:** Whoever's out there: hello...! We're out of the Prologue and into the chapters proper now. (Don't worry: we're not starting over.) Thanks for reading this thing... and, if you care to, don't be afraid to speak up. Comments are more than welcome...!

#####

#####

**Chapter One: Margaret and Tom**

The pain was so awful, so sudden and sharp, that it threw him clear out of a deep sleep. Tom Buckley had been dreaming, something amorphous, dark, and vaguely smothering; just like that, the dream was gone from his mind, driven out by the spasms stabbing through his right shoulder and arm. Waking, he sat up and shouted out loud, a harsh, primal bark from well down in his chest—

Then, like that, the spasms stopped. Tom, as if cut loose from wires that had hooked their way into the flesh of his torso, fell back and lay in the dark, panting, his eyes open and wide, afraid to move lest he re-trigger whatever had just happened. But, whatever it had been, it had passed. His arm and shoulder felt not numb but normal. He felt no other pain. He coaxed himself to relax, drew and released half a dozen slow, deep breaths, and looked to the red digital readout on his bedside clock. Eleven-fifteen p.m. Not even midnight. He'd been feeling unusually tired and had gone to bed early; now, with the spasms compounding his atypical exhaustion, he found himself wondering if he should go to the E.R. Was he pre-stroke? Was it his heart?

In the final analysis, it was late, cold rain was pelting the windows of his loft bedroom, and Tom Buckley, alone in his bed, was an existentialist if not a fatalist. Whatever it was, it could wait until morning. And if it returned and killed him while he slept, he wouldn't have to worry about it any more, would he?

#####

Three hundred miles north, seven and a half hours later, on a misty morning on a rocky island off the coast of Maine, Anne Cassidy, with huge black Book, her Newfoundland, wandering the shore in front of her, scanned the gray water of the Atlantic for ships, for boats adrift, for post-storm debris. She'd had a largely sleepless night: the gale had finally kicked in in earnest around twenty-three-thirty, then whipped and howled until oh-four-hundred; the fog lifted just before dawn, taking the cloud-cover with it; and only then, once she'd shut off the horn of the Crow Island light station, did she grab a quick nap. She'd sleep again once she'd finished her patrol.

A roar approached from the direction of the mainland: the wreck divers from Macready's Point passing by Crow Island in their big black-hulled deck-boat. Real macho men. Five of them on deck. They looked Cassidy's way, leering and shouting lewd suggestions. Three of them turned and mooned her. As usual, she didn't react, didn't respond. Brave for what they did, she thought, wreck diving being one of the most dangerous activities on earth, but assholes nevertheless. Normally, she found it easy to ignore them. Today, tired and feeling oddly tense, she had to fight an urge to go and get the shotgun from its locked rack in the keeper's house and fire a warning-blast or two over their heads.

Time being money and wrecking not being the cheapest of hobbies, she mused, continuing her way around to the the far northern point of the island: she would imagine that, after last night's storm, the bottom might be too riled up for diving. Or maybe it wouldn't be, as deep as they might be planning to go. She'd heard tell, too, from Dick Tulley, that someone in town was at least partly funding their exploration of whatever wreck it was that they were targeting. Rumors of an Allied ship from World War II, likely a container vessel. Hardly sunken treasure— or as remotely mysterious as that Nazi U-boat that wreckers had found off the coast of New Jersey a few years back— but what did she know...?

Twenty yards ahead of her, Book barked suddenly, then growled, at something in the water not far offshore. Cassidy at first saw nothing; she leveled the binoculars, looked.

It was the bottom of an overturned black Zodiac, riding, nearly submerged, in the low, rolling waves.

#####

With Book, she set out in the launch; when she pulled alongside the Zodiac, she felt her heart pounding. It was Buckley's boat. Robert's.

The motor was missing. Had it not been, the Zodiac likely would have sunk completely. Water sloshed about on its upturned bottom. Cassidy got a hook under one of its side ropes; with the help of the launch's winch, she heaved the Zodiac over and upright. Underneath, she found...

... nothing. No Buckley. No blood. Only, upon closer examination, the light playing tricks on the Zodiac's wet skin, traces of something sticky and black, like crude oil.

#####

Back at Crow Island, in the keeper's house, Cassidy notified the Coast Guard and the Macready's Point police. The standard report, part of her duties as keeper of the Crow Island light station: Vessel unmanned and adrift. Missing-persons report to follow, details gleaned from keeper's personal knowledge: male Caucasian, early thirties, five-foot-seven or -eight, approximately one hundred and fifty pounds, no distinguishing scars, dark hair and beard, blue eyes.

Dan Shellberg, Macready Point's chief dispatcher, took the call:

_Thanks, Annie. We'll get the crew out looking; we'll keep you posted. Macready's Point out._

Concern in his voice, through the crackle of the radio. Maybe more than absolutely necessary. Maybe the product of fifty-six years in a small town where little happened, where the endangerment or loss of a single life, even that of a relative stranger, engendered compassion rather than cynicism. Surely Cassidy had done nothing to invite sympathy for herself: she'd heard her own voice, flat and distant and detached, as she gave Buckley's description.

In the radio-shack corner of the keeper's house, Cassidy switched off the transmitter. She stayed where she was, her hands in her lap, while the stillness of the house settled about her, wrapped its way around her shoulders and her heart.

_Blue eyes._ What she hadn't said, then: _Eyes of the clearest blue. Eyes of a blue you wouldn't believe, no matter how many summer skies you saw over a sunlit sea—_

Book came and settled himself at her feet with a heavy sigh-out of breath. Cassidy reached absently to stroke his furred massive shoulder while her own eyes filled with tears.

#####

Three hundred miles to Cassidy's south, Tom Buckley paid a morning visit to a doctor he knew on the staff of the hospital at Stony Brook University. He sat, shirtless, on a paper-topped exam table while Carl Wilkinson, M.D., bespectacled, balding in his late thirties, his expression perpetually one of mild-mannered worry, wrapped Tom's arm in a blood-pressure cuff, pressed the breath-warmed sensor-pad of a stethoscope to his leanly muscled chest and back.

"Any headaches, Tom?" Wilkinson asked.

"No."

"Any tingling or numbness? Dizziness?"

"Nope."

"I could order a C.A.T. scan," Wilkinson said, after he'd taken readings and had his listen, fore and aft. "I could order a stress test. But it would only tell us what we can both already guess."

"Which is—?"

"You work too many hours, and you don't get enough sleep."

"Any conjectures as to what caused that pain?"

"Changes in workout. Racquetball strain." Wilkinson shrugged. "Could even have been a stressor within whatever dream you were having: your body tensed while you were under, and _pop_. What were you dreaming about? Any idea?"

"I remember— It's all really vague... It was like I was being suffocated. Something was— I couldn't breathe. I tried to break free, and— It was more than a _pop_: it felt like my arm was being torn off."

"Whatever it was, you're asymptomatic now. You want me to order those tests?"

"No. Don't bother."

"Alright." Wilkinson took the obligatory pause, the one that said he would prefer that Tom have the battery of tests but that he, Wilkinson, couldn't force the matter, either professionally or as a friend. He tapped the tip of his ballpoint on Tom's clip-boarded intake sheet. "Then we'll opt for the standard cure-all: aspirin or Advil as needed, and take it easy for a couple of days."

Tom got down from the table. "Whatever you say, Carl."

#####

That night, following a day of writing lecture notes, of working on his book (a physics text he was too apt to neglect), of taking a long swim in the campus pool, Tom found a message on his answering machine. He typically received messages on his cell, not on his landline, and the machine had no visual indicator: Tom had to remind himself to check it occasionally, should anyone be using what was essentially an outdated number. He picked up the receiver, heard the tell-tale stutter in the dial tone, keyed in his passcode—

_Tom—? Hi. How are you—?_

Robert. His brother. Sounding not just his usually gregarious if misfocused self, but troubled, too. All over something to do with a lighthouse, luminous algae, a shrieking like that of gulls, a woman on a beach, and a song whose title Tom recognized but whose tune he couldn't quite recall. At first, thinking Robert either high or drunk, Tom was irritated. Then he began to catch the slightest hush, a tone of dread, in his brother's voice. Increasingly puzzled, more concerned than annoyed, he listened while Robert rambled to a conclusion and wished him well.

Tom exited the answering service, checked his call log, dialed the number that had to have been the one Robert was using. He got an answering service, courtesy of the Happer Institute; he left a message. He tried to write, couldn't concentrate. Left another message for Robert. He made himself a late dinner of pasta and marinara sauce and salad; he scanned the dustier reaches of his CD collection.

That night, Tom Buckley dozed off with the synthesized surge of "God Moving over the Face of the Waters" still rising and falling in his mind.

#####

The next day, at the university, he mentioned Robert's message to Margaret Matheson: regal, square-jawed, somber Margaret. Margaret of the still-dark-but-graying shoulder-length brown hair, the intent brown eyes, the skeptical frown, the occasional wry smile. Margaret who, in her prime, had been just short of six feet tall: even now, with the settling that accompanied age, she was taller than Tom.

They both taught at Stony Brook, she in psychology, he in physics; they shared a fascination with the paranormal, specifically with the compulsions that led outwardly intelligent people to abandon reason to the promises of so-called psychics and other charlatans. On the weekends, the odd weeknight, and, most intensively, between terms, they pursued and debunked said charlatans— an exhilaratingly skeptical hobby, and one that, for both of them, touched on obsession— and earned them not only a colorful notoriety among their other colleagues (Tom was Mulder to Matheson's Scully, or vice-versa, depending on who you asked) but the occasional odd threat from the so-called mind-readers, death-talkers, and faith-healers that they exposed.

On a personal level, they were close friends, not lovers: though Margaret, pushing sixty, was an attractive woman, enough of a difference existed between her age and Tom's to excuse the absence of physical involvement between them, to forestall the obligations and messy entanglements, physical, psychological, and emotional, of a sexual relationship. Neither of them was married, though Margaret had been, once; her one son, tragically rendered comatose following a car wreck, was a resident in a local hospice. Tom, to the best of his knowledge, had no offspring. (Children, he thought, were the primary means by which the human species perpetuated the world's woes.) He approached intimacy with tact and caution, and he'd managed a handful of affairs both with women his age and with those a bit younger: Tom, thirty-one, handsome and youthful-looking if slight of build, with thick, reddish-brown, semi-unruly hair, frankly sculpted cheekbones, lips that erred on the side of fullness, and wideset clear blue eyes, had attracted more than one female co-ed, and, though he made it a rule not to date anyone with whom he shared an academic relationship— that is to say, to whom he owed a grade— he was only human, and he responded both to the flattery of attention and to his own wants.

He had only Robert as immediate family. Their father had been hit head-on in his car and killed by a drunk driver when Tom and Robert were twenty-two; their mother, subsequently committing suicide by Marlboro, had succumbed to esophageal cancer when her sons were twenty-five. Though Tom was loath to admit it, Matheson was something of a maternal surrogate. She definitely was a confidante.

All of which Matheson knew, and which certainly justified her surprise now, as she cleared papers from her desk in the tactfully cluttered, high-windowed cavern she called an office. "First of all, Tom," she said, "a moment of incredulity here: you never told me you had a brother."

"We're not, umm— we're not exactly close."

Out of general, genuine curiosity, Matheson half-smiled, half-frowned. "What does he do? Is he older or younger than you?"

"He's a marine biologist. And he's older. By about ten minutes."

"I don't understand—" Matheson stopped, then, with her laptop bag half-clasped shut. "Wait: he's your twin? You have a _twin_ brother?"

Tom nodded, a little sheepishly.

Matheson looked at him incredulously. "And you haven't spoken to him in nearly a year?"

"Like I said, we're not exactly close."

One of Matheson's rare chuckles. "You _do_ realize that's putting the lie to a fairly widely held belief, don't you, Tom?"

Tom scratched the back of his neck. "Yeah, Margaret. Yeah, I do."

"Did you try calling him back?"

"I left a message. Two messages. He hasn't returned either one."

"Where is he?"

"Maine. A town on the coast, north of Brunswick."

"Well, if you're worried, why don't you drive up and see him? Why don't _we_ drive up and see him? I could stand to get out of here for a couple of days. So could you."

"Margaret, I couldn't ask you to—"

"You just did, Tom. Come on. We'll take my car; you'll pay for gas."

"Jesus, Margaret, I've only just hit seniority: how much money do you think I have...?"

Matheson grinned. "Fine. We'll split on the gas." She laid a hand on Tom's shoulder and added, more seriously: "Pick a time, Tom, and we'll go."

It was the wrong shoulder— the left, not the right— and yet, suddenly, Tom felt a ghost-stab of the pain from the day before. He suppressed a shudder even as he saw the concern deepen in Matheson's dark eyes. "Thanks, Margaret."

#####

Up to Maine. The Bridgeport-North Jefferson ferry. Then northbound, through the fresh summer green of the eastern seaboard. Not willing to admit how worried he was, Tom suggested that they leave at an ungodly hour of the morning; not wanting to argue with her friend when he was so obviously concerned, Matheson agreed. She took first shift at the wheel while Tom, in the passenger seat, caught up on some of the sleep he'd lost the night before. Somewhere in western Connecticut, misty mid-morning sunlight coming through the Bonneville's windshield, he woke to find her singing along with the radio: one being the— yes, being the— _one is the loneliest number,_ in an unapologetic amateur alto.

Tom blinked the sleep from his eyes, focused on the stereo display. "That's not— Holy shit. That's Three Dog Night, isn't it?"

Matheson replied: "It certainly is, young man."

Tom let his skull fall back against the headrest. "You're haunting my dreams, Margaret."

Matheson smiled wryly. "At least I'm not fueling your nightmares. Go back to sleep, Tom."

#####

About an hour later, just north of Chelmsford, Massachusetts, they stopped for sandwiches and coffee. Then it was Tom's turn to drive. He was still at the wheel, having exited I-95 north for a coastbound two-lane, warm grass-and-salt-scented air blowing through the rolled-down driver's-side window of the Bonneville, when he glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the red-blue flash of a light bar. A black-and-white, moving up behind them with intention, if not aggression.

"Shit," Tom muttered. He slowed, eased the Pontiac onto the shoulder. At the rumble of gravel under the tires, Matheson stirred from a nap, woke. She frowned muzzily at the passenger-side mirror.

"How fast were you going, Tom?"

"I was doing the speed limit, Margaret." Tom tried not to sound as irritated as he felt. He put the Pontiac in park. "Or near enough."

"'Near enough' doesn't always cut it outside the cities."

In the center mirror, Tom watched the officer approach. Dun-colored trousers, a dark blue jacket open over a button-down khaki uniform shirt, non-mirrored Aviators. A woman in her mid-forties, lean and rangy in build, thin through the face, her brown hair mostly concealed under a brimmed hat. Tom rolled the window the rest of the way down and put both of his hands on the crown of the steering wheel as she reached the car.

"Afternoon," the officer said. No challenge to her tone: just a statement of fact.

Tom looked up at her. "Hello," he countered, equally noncommital.

"License and registration, please."

Tom handed up his license; Matheson retrieved the Pontiac's insurance card from the glove box. "This is my car," she told the officer, as she handed the card over to her. "He has my permission to drive it."

The officer smiled slightly. "Understood, ma'am."

Tom asked, while she examined his license: "May I ask what this is about? Was I speeding?"

"Yes. And no. Was just running a hunch here—"

"I beg your pardon—?"

"— and I think it's paid off." The officer handed Tom his license. "I'm Chief of Police Frances Hollister, of the Macready's Point police department. Are you any relation to Doctor Robert Buckley, Tom?"

"I'm his brother."

Chief Hollister took off her sunglasses and looked Tom very directly in the face. Her gray eyes were kindly and sharp and edged with crows' feet. "Well, so you are."

"Is Robert in some kind of trouble?" Tom asked.

"He went missing about two days ago—" A silver Ford F250 passed, doing the speed limit or a bit above; Hollister looked after it, shifting closer to the Pontiac as she did. They were on an old crowned two-lane asphalt road: hardly the best place to be conducting a conversation with someone driving a car as broad as the Bonneville. "Look, Tom," she said, "would you and Miss Matheson mind following me to the station? Be more comfortable talking there."

#####

The Macready's Point police department was housed in a single-story brick building set back from the road, said road running perpendicular to and midway along Main Street, at the summit of a hill leading down to the waterfront. Tom parked the Pontiac in a spot signed VISITOR; Chief Hollister waited for him and Matheson outside the building's heavy outer glass-and-steel doors. At the top of a twenty-foot pole to the right of the doors, the Stars and Stripes snapped in the salt-tinged breeze, above the farmer and the seaman standing side by side, a pine tree and a resting moose between them, on the blue state flag of Maine.

#####

Save for the department dispatcher, a tall, thin, older man with expressive pale blue eyes and graying hair swept back off a high forehead, all of Hollister's people— all five of them, by the available space and the count of desks in the station— were out helping with the search for Robert Buckley or otherwise performing their duties in the field.

Asked Hollister, as they passed the dispatcher's desk: "I miss anything while I was out, Dan?"

"Not a thing." The name tag on Dan's shirt read SHELLBERG. He eyed Matheson and Tom. "You need help with these two, Frances?"

"Think coffee will just about cover it, Dan. If it's no problem."

"Yep." Or _ay-up_. Two syllables. That was how it sounded to Tom. Shellberg pushed up out of his office chair. "Will do."

#####

Seated behind the desk in her office, Hollister got them up to speed over fresh Folgers served up in white stoneware mugs stenciled _Macready's Point P.D._ in faded blue. By all estimates, Robert Buckley had met with mischief in or around the archipelago of islands ranging approximately three to eight miles offshore from town either before or— more likely— during a squall that had blown in from the sea two nights ago. He'd set out to collect water and plant samples from the catches he'd planted around the islands; he never came back.

From a vinyl-cushioned steel-framed chair across the desk from her, Tom asked: "Who reported him missing?"

"The lightkeeper on Crow Island," Hollister replied. "She found his boat overturned and adrift."

Matheson, seated to Tom's left, raised an eyebrow: "'She'...?"

"Mm hm." Hollister blew lightly at the black surface of her coffee, sipped. "College girl, up for the season. Been here about four months, actually. Does her job, and she's not a half-bad mechanic, too, from what I hear." She looked from Matheson to Tom. "Imagine you'll be wanting a look around."

Tom nodded. "If we're not in the way—"

"Not at all. The Happer Institute would probably be the place to start." Sheriff Hollister wrote out directions on a slip of white memo paper, slid the paper over to Tom. "And you'll be needing a place to stay."

"We passed a motel on the way in to town—" Matheson said.

"Naw. You don't want the Baraboo. The place is overrun with wreckers. Wreck divers. Worse than Hell's Angels. Here—" Hollister wrote out another set of directions. "Gal by the name of Nancy Patterson, runs a B&B called 'The Rocky Point.' She'll put you up. Give you a fair rate, too. I'll let her know you're coming."

#####

Up in the lamp room, Cassidy was having a go at the gyroscope, which, she told herself, had picked up a bit of a shudder over the last two weeks. A tilt to the pan, perhaps— God forbid the sealants around the mercury pool had sprung a leak. More truthfully, she was doing something to keep herself busy, something to keep her mind off of Robert Buckley— _They'll find him,_ she told herself. He'd turn up. He was marooned on one of the outer islands, and he and Cassidy would share a laugh about his twenty-four-hour Crusoe-ism over beef stew and a loving chastisement and between the sheets later— when she heard what sounded like the _Fallen Angel _approaching, far below, only there was more than one engine, and at least one she didn't recognize. Then the engines fell silent, and a minute or so later Dick Tulley shouted up the tower:

"Annie—?"

"Up here, Dick."

"I'll need you t' come down, please."

Something in his tone. Cassidy set aside her tools and descended from the lamp room. Tulley was waiting for her in the doorway of the lighthouse; she followed him outside.

A Coast Guard inflatable was tied up behind the _Fallen Angel_ at the jetty.

Cassidy frowned at the boats, the three extra people, two men and a woman, all of them in uniform, standing on the dock. Book was making a quiet inspection of the strangers, sniffing hands, accepting pats to his broad head and back.

Cassidy asked: "Dick, what's going on—?"

She stopped. She knew before he replied. She knew, and still it was a shock—

Tulley's tone was uncharacteristically gentle: "They found him, Annie. Doctor Buckley. They think he got clipped by a tanker. They're trying to contact his family now—"

"Oh, God—" Cassidy whispered.

"— but they need someone to— to identify him, to make it official, and you knew him better than— than—"

It was as if something were swelling in Cassidy's chest, forcing the air from her lungs. She felt a desperate need to sit down. "I can't leave the station," she said.

"That's what they're here for." Tulley gestured at the Coast Guard personnel on the jetty. "They'll keep an eye on things while you're gone."

#####

No need to lock the keeper's house. Cassidy retrieved only her jacket. She kept her tri-fold wallet, complete with her identification, in her jeans pocket, not in a purse.

Book followed her to the _Fallen Angel._

"Stay, now, laddie," Tulley told him. "Your missus'll be right back."

"No," said Cassidy. "I want him with me. I want my dog."

"Alright, then." Tulley pointed to the deck of his boat. "Book: here."

Book came aboard; Tulley cast off. The _Fallen Angel_ set off for Macready's Point.

#####

Tom and Matheson dropped their bags at the Rocky Point bed-and-breakfast, an enclosed-porch two-story-plus-attic on a bluff outside Macready's Point, with a wide and windswept view of the ocean and an archipelago of distant misty islands to the front and a wide stand of the area's omnipresent dark firs to the rear.

Nancy Patterson came out the screened back door of the porch and down the house's stone steps when the Pontiac's tires crunched onto the graveled square marked off as a parking area. She was in her late forties, tall and solid, with bobbed dark hair; she wore a blue sweatshirt, jeans, and white canvas boat shoes.

She smiled as she approached the Pontiac. "Hi—"

In regional dialect, it came out as "Heyyyah." Tom shut off the Pontiac, got out. "Hi. I'm Doctor Buckley—"

"— and you—" said Nancy Patterson, looking from him to Matheson— "—are Doctor Matheson, right...? Fran said you'd be right up. I'm Nancy. Glad to know you."

Tom shook the hand she offered. Her grip was strong, her fingers warm and bony and rough-skinned. Matheson, shaking hands with her in turn, surveyed the parking area. Aside from a pine-green, mud-spattered Subaru Forester, the Bonneville was alone.

"Are we your only tenants?" she asked.

"Naw. Them two, they're hiking the trails. Got a couple out antiquing, another three off sailing," Nancy replied. She intercepted Tom as he popped the trunk on the Pontiac. "Let me give you a hand with your things."

She had their overnights out of the trunk and wrangled deftly through the porch door and into the house before Tom had even a chance of gallantly protesting; she laid out the house rules— breakfast from seven until nine-thirty, fresh bakery always on hand, quiet after ten p.m., please— as they passed through the kitchen and the sitting room; on the way up the carpeted, softly creaking staircase, a pine bannister to their right, she said: "I've put you facing the ocean, Doctor Matheson, and you've got the woods, Doctor Buckley. Unless you'd prefer it the other way 'round; it's all up to you."

She deposited their bags; Tom and Matheson thanked her; she left them alone. The rooms were small and cozy, more sensible than kitschy. Good down comforters on the beds, solid knotted-pine furniture, a minimum of knick-knacks on the dresser tops. Tom did, indeed, have a view of the firs, their sharp dark tops pointing like spears into the blue sky. He left his overnight where Nancy had set it and went to meet Margaret in her room across the hall.

She was at the window, smoothing out and hanging the one top she'd brought that was in true danger of wrinkling. "Wonder if that's Crow Island."

Tom joined her, looked out to sea. Even through a scrim of worry, it was a beautiful view. They were maybe a hundred feet off the water, the bluff leading down to the shore in a tumble of rocks not quite sheer enough to be called a cliff; the ocean was semi-smooth and glittering under the early summer sun. From the south proceeding northward, Tom could see four, possibly five, small islands; on the island second from the south stood a lighthouse.

"Could be." For a moment, he thought he saw a boat moving on the water, approaching the mainland from the island. Hard to tell, given the brightness and the angle of the sun. "Suppose we'll know soon enough."

#####

The Maine branch of the Happer Institute was a cluster of eco-friendly block-like buildings set among the rocks of yet another bluff north of town. Plenty of natural light, courtesy of double-paned insulated glass, and a more-than-sincere nod to alternative energy sources, as evidenced by the arrays of rooftop solar panels that augmented the campus's power plant. From the bank of windows in the reception area of the institute's main building, Tom could see, at shore level, a building that might have provided shelter for wet-labs, a boat house, and a handful of Zodiacs and small fixed-hulls lying at berth at a pair of docks. The reception area itself reflected the surrounding rocks in terms of its coloring: shale and lighter grays, the warmth of red-gold granite.

No one was at the reception desk— Chief Hollister had warned them that the staff tended to fare for themselves when it came to greeting visitors— but, within a minute of Tom and Matheson's arrival, a woman with long blonde hair and a functional build, her white lab coat open over a blue t-shirt bearing the snarling logo of the Maine State Black Bears, emerged from a hallway leading off to the right and, smiling, came to meet them.

"Hi," she said. "I'm Jessica Brand. Chief Hollister said you'd be coming." She shook Matheson's hand. "Doctor Matheson, I presume—"

Matheson nodded, tipped her head toward Tom. "And this is Doctor Buckley—"

Doctor Brand looked from Matheson to Tom. Met his eyes and, for just a second, froze. Tom as much as saw the word— _uncanny_— register in her expression.

"Come on," said Jessica Brand. "I'll show you around."

#####

It was all a distraction, Tom realized. A waste of time. Still: what else could they do? Trained professionals were combing the coastal area for Robert; should they insist on joining in the search, Tom and Matheson would only be in the way, could very likely become liabilities or casualties themselves, given their inexperience with the area and with the ocean. And the institute— more specifically, Robert's workspace and living quarters— might reveal something of his frame of mind, his motivations, might offer clues as to where he was when he went missing.

So, dutifully, with a growing sense of sick apprehension, Tom perused the notes and written logs Robert had made, his schedules (already forwarded to the Coast Guard and the local search team) for checking his catch-strainers. In the lab area, then, while he noted the samples of algae that Robert had kept, both in solution and on slides, Matheson drifted toward a series of small aquariums arranged on a work bench.

"Those are mine," said Jessica Brand. "I'm the local clam expert."

Tom joined Matheson in perusing what looked basically, despite the presence of aerators, like glass cases of silty water and muck; he paused, as she did, at one particular case. Particular in that its screened top was padlocked.

Matheson looked to Brand with a bemused smile. "Are you afraid they'll escape...?"

Tom still had his eyes on the aquarium: for just a second, he saw clearly a row of shells at the bottom, half-buried in the mud. They were a glistening, oily black; they were partly open. Tom leaned in for a closer look— and, in unison, the shells closed.

"Wait—" He gestured to the tank. "Margaret, did you see—"

A man's voice interrupted him: "Don't be eyeing Jessie's prizes, now, Doctor Buckley. She's afraid you'll borrow them for lunch."

Tom straightened away from the tank. A solidly built man with black hair, wearing a windbreaker, not a lab coat, over a pale green polo, was approaching from the direction of the lab's exit.

"Steve: hi," said Doctor Brand, turning toward him. "This is Dr. Matheson; you've already guessed that this is Robert's brother, Tom. I thought they might like to see his workspace—"

"— not, however, a bunch of bivalves that would look better in a pot." The man called Steve smiled for Tom and Matheson— a smile, Tom thought, that missed "facetious" by a good mile and landed squarely in the realm of "brittle." "If you're done here, Jessie, maybe Doctor Buckley would like to have a look at his brother's living quarters." He added, as he offered Tom and Matheson yet another of the day's rounds of handshakes: "I'm Doctor Stephen Costas. Glad to meet you."

Obviously, Matheson had also noted the quality of Doctor Costas's smile. "Charmed," she said, coolly, as she took his hand.

#####

"So why do you think he was running interference...?" Matheson asked, once Costas had left her and Tom alone in the cabin that Robert had used as his living quarters and, more than that, once she'd had a chance to verify, via a casual glance through the paned window over the kitchen sink, that he was, in fact, clear of the door and apparently on his way back to the institute's main building.

Tom was in the cabin's living area, seeing what little there was to see. Robert had traveled light, by the look of things; aside from the functional, largely wood-framed furniture— a green sofa and and a mohair easy chair, a small flatscreen TV, a work desk with a closed Macbook, yet more handwritten logs and notes regarding algae, a handful of books related to his field— there was little to mark the space as his. Oddly, Tom found himself afraid to look in the bedroom or the bathroom, to see clothing in his size, possibly to spot whiskers the color of his own hair in the sink.

He joined Matheson in the kitchen instead. "What's that, Margaret?"

"He wanted us out of there, Tom," Matheson replied. "That was obvious." As she spoke, she opened the refrigerator, looked inside. "Well, you and Robert have _that_ in common."

The refrigerator held next to nothing, and what it held could best be classified as contradictions. Low-fat plain yogurt, soy milk, a half-head of celery, and a bag of apples. Wholegrain bagels, pre-sliced. Three bottles of microwbrew pale ale. A half-empty box of Twinkies, a package of sliced American cheese, cold cuts, and, in the freezer, garden burgers.

"And not a clam in sight." Matheson shut the freezer.

Tom didn't reply. He remained where he was, beside her, looking at the closed freezer door; it struck him, then, how bare the white enamel looked. No Post-It notes. No magnets printed with take-out menus or the number of the local pizza place, if there was one (and there had to be, civilization being a sign of pizza, not vice-versa). No emergency contacts. And...

"... no pictures," Matheson murmured, as much as reading his mind. "A cliche, and yet we can't help but expect to see them."

Tom nodded. He didn't know, exactly, what photos Robert might have displayed on a major household appliance (even using such terminology, though, he couldn't see it as a joke, not now): snapshots of himself with colleagues, possibly, or a girlfriend, or even some particularly beautiful-in-the-eyes-of-the-beholder sample of his beloved algae. Tom found himself trying to recall the last time that he and his brother had appeared in a photo together: something to describe for Matheson now, the two of them, he and Robert, in costume for Halloween, maybe, or together at school, with family at Christmas or Thanksgiving; he found he could see nothing, nothing at all, in his mind—

Someone knocked at the cabin's door. Before either Tom or Matheson could move to answer it, Sheriff Hollister opened it and looked in.

"Pardon me, Doctor Matheson, Doctor Buckley—" She focused on Tom, and the expression on her thin face was both flustered and deeply tragic. "I'm so sorry, Tom: I'm afraid I have some bad news."

#####

A group of fishermen had found Robert. Had netted his body, just below the surface, in about a hundred feet of water three quarters of a mile southeast of Crow Island. Absolutely by chance: nothing would have prevented the currents from carrying him farther on down the coast. Owing to the usual mixups with the official channels and a sorry upgrade to the local radio-dispatch system, Hollister had only just received the message.

"Mortuary facilities in the town clinic: they've transported him there," she said. Tom thought, with distant and absolute clarity, that she seemed more stricken than he was. She had her hat in her hands, was turning it slowly by the brim, like a rolling of rosary beads. "I'll show you the way."

Matheson drove the Pontiac as they followed Hollister's squad car back toward Macready's Point.

#####

The Macready's Point Clinic. Another single-story building in red brick, only larger and of more modern a vintage than the town police station. A pillared canopy sheltered a drive-up and the sidewalk in front of the glass main doors; a U-lane of asphalt looping in off the parking lot accommodated trauma arrivals at the building's western side. An ambulance was still sitting at the emergency entrance now. Margaret parked the Bonneville next to a late-eighties tan Silverado pickup that had taken its share of ocean salt; she stayed protectively close to Tom as they walked with Chief Hollister to the clinic doors.

None of them spoke; Tom had his eyes fixed on a point just ahead of his walking feet. Consequently, as the young woman just inside the clinic doors had her own attention fixated on the course immediately before her, she and Tom collided with one another.

He recoiled at the shock of physical contact; she seemed to recoil in horror. His immediate and brief impression of her was that she was in her mid-twenties, brown-haired, lovely if windburned through the face. She'd been crying. She met Tom's eyes, her own eyes so dark as to be nearly black, and breathed out harshly, practically spitting the word in his face: "_Jesus_—"

Before Tom could react, let alone respond, she stepped past him and pushed her way out through the clinic doors. A tall, fair-haired, older man in a blue jacket followed along after her a moment later.

"Tulley," Chief Hollister said to him, in sober greeting.

In passing, Tulley nodded to her, to Matheson, and, with a shadow of the young woman's shock on his face, to Tom. "Chief—" he said, to Hollister. "If you'll pardon me—"

He went out the doors after the young woman. "Annie, hold up—"

"That was her, wasn't it—?" Matheson said slowly, once the door had shut behind Tulley's broad back.

"Who—?" Tom asked, still somewhat lost in shock.

"Anne Cassidy," Hollister replied. "The keeper of the Crow Island light station."

#####

#####

#####


	5. Chapter Two: Tom and Robert

Well, we're back! Apologies for the delay: there are, of course, myriad excuses (one of which involved a very large rock and the windshield of my Mini), but it all boils down to this: onward! Thanks for reading this thing; thanks, especially, to those of you who've submitted comments. I do appreciate it— even if I'm absolutely terrible about replying. Anyway, the show goes on... and I hope you've got the Kleenex handy: things are gonna get grim before they get better. Have at it, folks...!

#####

#####

**Chapter Two: Tom and Robert  
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Dr. Emil Sazerac was of a height slightly stooped at the shoulders from "taller-than" to "average." He was in his early fifties, bald across the top, a half-ring of curling gray-brown hair warming his ears and the back of his skull. He wore a clean white lab coat open over a three-piece brown-moss tweed suit, he was long through the face yet prim through the mouth, and his hazel eyes were small and sharp and bright. He was standing at a steel table, half-facing the door, writing notes in ballpoint in a spiral-bound journal. To his left was a mortuary table on which was laid a sheeted human body. The sheet was soaked darkly through across the body's feet and torso and face.

Soaked through not only with water. _Blood_. Tom, looking, thought he could feel his heartbeat slowing.

Chief Hollister rapped on the steel doorframe. "Emil?"

Dr. Sazerac replied, as he finished writing his notes: "Maybe the late Doctor Buckley and I should have sold tickets, Frances. You're our second group of visitors in less than ten minutes."

"Emil, you'll want to watch your manners, please." Chief Hollister ushered Matheson and Tom into the lab. "This is Doctor Buckley's brother, Tom."

Sazerac put down his pen, turned to peer at them as if over a pair of half-moon glasses that weren't actually there. Tom didn't reach for a handshake. The doctor, in turn, with the distance of someone who thought best of humans when they were quietly and manageably deceased, kept his hands at his sides. "Facial hair— or lack thereof— won't hide an identical twin, Chief Hollister."

"Who was here before us?" Matheson asked.

"A young woman by the name of Anne Cassidy. Dick Tulley, too. Stayed right by her side." Sazerac's voice was a tenor disarmingly soft, given the veiled irritation in his tone. "Unless they went out the emergency entrance, you would have seen them on your way in." He looked to Hollister. "Frances, I wasn't informed that Doctor Buckley had family in the area—"

Hollister removed her hat, moving farther into the room. "They blew in just this afternoon, Emil."

"Ah. Coincidence."

_Bastard_, Tom thought. "You let just anyone in to make an identification?"

"It was my understanding that she and Doctor Buckley were friends."

He laid insinuation like a shroud over the word _friends_. Tom felt his face go hot. "What are you imply—"

Matheson gently touched his arm. "Tom—"

Tom turned to her. In doing so, he experienced something akin to vertigo. He felt as if his heart were kicking, not pounding, in his chest. As though his sternum were a layer of ice blocking his access to open air and oxygen. Both Matheson and Hollister were looking at him with open concern.

"Do you need a moment, Tom?" Hollister asked. "We can wait until—"

"No." Tom looked coldly at Sazerac. "Let me see him."

"Of course." Sazerac arched brushy eyebrows. _The living and their demands: what can you do?_ He stepped to the far side of the mortuary table, nodded down at the sheeted body. "As you've likely guessed, this is him. We haven't had a chance to clean him up or cut him out of his clothes. Anne Cassidy has preliminarily identified him as Doctor Robert Buckley. His face is largely intact, but he suffered a certain amount of trauma. To the upper torso especially."

He gripped the sheet at either side of the body's head and slowly, so as not to splash the visitors to his mortuary with either water or blood, drew it back.

Tom found himself holding his breath while he looked at the edge of the steel table just above the body's face. For a moment he couldn't bring himself to look at the face itself. This moment of anonymity, before he knew, inevitably and for certain, that his brother was dead: he felt it standing still in a stream of seconds.

He closed his eyes. A long blink, really, time still running more slowly if no longer at a standstill. Things the intertwined webs of equations his physicist's mind could normally explain: basic tenets of relativity. Freshman stuff, all a blur now, a blank. By the time he shifted his gaze southward, to the face of the corpse on the table, his lids were already re-opening.

He looked, and felt no shock. Not really. After all, it was not unlike looking in a mirror.

Robert's eyes were closed. Tom noted that first of all— that, and the accompanying thought, primal in its blind hope and completely irrational, lasting no more than one of those long, numb, time-slowed seconds, that this was a hoax, a horrifying prank: the Buckley on the table would open his eyes and grin up at the Buckley standing above, and earn himself an almighty thrashing, a bonecrushing hug—

But no. An animal sense more primordial than hope observed the stillness of the body on the table, a flesh-and-bone object surrendered by lack of a soul or will or simple electric impulse to the un-grip of entropy.

_He's dead,_ it told Tom.

A fine shaking settled into Tom's frame as he looked at his brother. No smell of decay as of yet— a clinical noting, without gratitude: Robert had been found not long after he died, and the water from which he'd been hauled was cold and deep. That was what Tom thought he could smell now: cold, a sunless distance, ghosts like those of melting ice.

Robert appeared to have been beaten to death. A bruised gash in his forehead, a dark circular mark about the size of a quarter high on his left cheek that might have become a bruise had the blood not ceased circulating through his body. His skin was blue-white, his eye sockets dark with lividity. His hair and beard were matted and wet; he still wore a knit green-checked shirt open over a white tee. His skin and shirts were smeared with something viscous and black, like creosote or crude oil.

And his right arm had been torn off at the shoulder.

No: _sheared_ off. Tom stared. He swallowed. Clean edges to the wound, little splintering of the bone—

"Is this your brother, Doctor Buckley?" Dr. Sazerac asked.

"Yes." Tom nodded. With effort, he shifted his focus from the nub of bone jutting shock-white from the raw flesh of his brother's shoulder. Again he focused on Robert's closed eyes; again, he had an awful, suspensive feeling, combined now with incipient nausea and a possibly more-awful hope, that Robert would suddenly open those eyes and look up at them—

"Then I am sorry for your loss," Sazerac said.

"At least they found him before the fish and the bottom-feeders got to him," Hollister murmured. She might not have realized she was speaking out loud.

"Was it a shark?" Matheson asked, a bit too carefully. She appeared to be sharing Tom's reactions, the horror not yet re-imagined as grief, the sickness— not necessarily at the sight of a dead body, however roughed up, but at seeing what was practically a copy of someone she'd known for years, a friend and colleague, lying dead on a steel table in a small-town morgue.

"No," Sazerac replied. "We're thinking— the rescue team thinks, and I'm tending to concur, at least for now— he was clipped by a tanker."

Matheson looked at him. "They come that close to shore?"

"Sometimes, in a storm, the water's calmer shoreward."

"And they just hit him and kept going?"

"With all due respect, Miss—"

"Doctor. Doctor Matheson."

"— it's not as easy as pulling over after a fender-bender. There's a good chance they didn't even know they'd hit anything."

Tom heard himself ask: "Might we see a list of ships that passed through last night?"

Sazerac replied not to him but to Hollister. "Frances, that's your department, isn't it?"

Hollister laid a hand on Tom's shoulder. "I'll get the data from the Coast Guard, Tom."

Now frowning, Matheson persisted: "Wouldn't he be in worse shape if that's what happened?"

"Likely enough. Which is why we'll be asking Doctor Buckley's permission to conduct an autopsy."

At the sound of his name, Tom shook himself. At the sound of the word _autopsy_, he shuddered. "Of course," he said, numbly. His eyes were still on Robert's face; he felt as though they should wait for the man to concur. In Tom's mind, his brother's death was still more theory than fact.

Beside him, Matheson leaned in for a closer look at Robert's face. "What's that on his skin?"

"We're thinking it's oil," Sazerac replied.

"From the tanker," Matheson said, drily.

"That's what we're thinking."

"Mm hm." Matheson shifted her attention to dead Doctor Buckley's mangled shoulder. "That bone looks like it was sawed through. Not broken."

The muscles around Sazerac's mouth began to tighten. "You're in forensics, Doctor Matheson?"

Matheson straightened to her full height, looked across at him. "Let's just say I spend too much time watching The Learning Channel."

Listening to them as if from the hallway, Tom was in the process of noticing his own details, forming his own realizations: Robert's hair, straggling-wet, in need of a cut, had been smoothed back away from his gashed forehead.

"Someone did that—" he said, indicating.

Sazerac broke off from the losing end of his stare-down with Matheson to look where Tom's fingers were hovering over, not quite touching, dead Doctor Buckley's bangs and skin. "That would be Miss Cassidy." He added, with more clinical detachment than tact: "She was... upset."

Tom's newly incepted grief spiked into a dizzying anger. He glared at Sazerac. "Anyone can walk in here and do whatever they want to the bodies—?"

He practically shouted the words; Sazerac, stunned and staring back at him, could for a moment manage nothing more than a holding-pattern "Umm," his thin lips pressing and unpressing like the gills of a beached fish

"Tom—" Matheson took him gently but very firmly by the shoulder. "I don't think you understand—"

Tom turned his glare to her gripping hand and, with a slightly shamed loss of intensity, to Matheson herself. "What's there to understand?"

"She was _involved_ with him. With Robert." Matheson looked to Hollister for confirmation. "Am I right?"

Hollister nodded, her expression sober. "That's the rumor, Margaret."

#####

They left Robert in the care of one of Sazerac's pathology assistants, a stocky, open-faced woman with frizzy red hair and thoughtful gray-green eyes who wore her lab coat open over a faded gray concert t-shirt touting The Roches. _Initial prep,_ Tom thought, his emotions again distant, as Sazerac ushered them out of the morgue and the dun-brown hollow-panel metal door closed between Tom and his brother, again fully sheeted but not for long. Now would come the cutting away of clothing, the cataloguing of wounds and marks, the removal and sampling of foreign bodies found in and around the corpse.

_Don't think it,_ Tom thought. _Don't. _He put out his hand; his fingertips touched the door—

"Are you okay, Tom?" Matheson asked.

She and Hollister and Sazerac were watching him. Waiting for him, even that ghoul of a mortician, with patience and sympathy in their expressions.

_Robbie, please wake up._

"Yeah. I'm okay," Tom replied. His face must have been as still as Robert's. He looked to Matheson and the others. "Let's go."

#####

Paperwork in Sazerac's office, the western sunlight sliding in a long slow wedge from the windows across his cluttered desk. Powers of attorney. Initial releases. Preliminary disposition of the body. _Of Robert's body, T_om found himself thinking._ Of my brother._ His mind had yet to transform the concept of distance (only this morning, to Tom, Robert had been hundreds of miles away, but reachable and alive) into separation (Robert was only forty feet away, and Tom would never reach him again). He focused patiently on the forms Sazerac put before him, even as he felt Matheson's and Hollister's concern at his stillness. Contact numbers, from both himself and Matheson. Robert's known wishes, if any. His denomination. Cremation, one; atheism, two. And the first inkling of a thought on Tom's part: _He'd want to be scattered somewhere. That's what he'd want. Somewhere over the ocean._

#####

Chief Hollister left them, with a few more murmured and sincere condolences, in the parking lot of the clinic. She gave them her number; they could feel free to call her. Tom and Matheson returned to the Rocky Point B&B. Matheson drove.

#####

Macready's Point was a small town: news traveled with the speed of broad-band telepathy. As Matheson and Tom approached the steps leading up to the Rocky Point's wide porch, Nancy Patterson took a break from the tomato patch she'd carved from the rocky soil on the house's south side and approached, smacking dirt from her gardening gloves; Tom muttered politely numb thanks at her "If there's anything I can do," and went inside.

He went upstairs to his room; Matheson followed. He sat on the edge of the bed. She sat opposite him, on a straight-backed chair near the door.

"I've been remembering the last time I saw him alive," Tom said, after a block of silence that might have lasted seconds, minutes, or centuries.

"And—?" Matheson prompted, gently.

"A month before Thanksgiving," Tom replied. "He showed up at Stony Brook on his way to Boston. He'd just gotten himself hired by the Happer Institute, and he wanted to celebrate. He brought along a couple of bottles of this really shitty zinfandel, and he said that either I could take him out for a real drink, or he'd force me to drink the zin. Well, we drank the zin anyway and still ended up going out for a drink or ten, and there were these girls at the bar—"

Tom blushed his way to a halt. Matheson smiled from her chair.

"So: ridiculously drunk _and_ ridiculously laid," she said. "Sounds like a perfect evening to me."

"You weren't there the next morning. Oh-my-fucking-God, what a hangover." Tom looked down at his hands, resting in his lap. "I don't know how he did it. That damned hippie beard. I told him he looked like Charles Manson. But those girls— Hell, Margaret: _three_ of them. _Three_. He fed them some line about how they were already seeing double, and how-about-a-magic-trick, and— and—"

He stopped, and it was as if he could feel the warmth seeping from his body. Matheson waited quietly. When they'd come upstairs, the sun had been above the firs to the west, and her chair had been sitting in a pool of pine-golden light. Now the tree-tops were casting pointed shadows into the room.

"He wasn't—" Tom began, and stopped again. His throat was hurting. He coughed softly to clear it. "He was a good man, Margaret. I didn't mean to imply that he wasn't. He was just—"

Tom didn't realize he was crying. Didn't realize it until Matheson came and sat beside him and drew his head against her shoulder, and he could feel the tears running down his cheeks.

"We should go home," she said, rocking him gently. "First thing tomorrow, after we've made the rest of the arrangements for Robert."

"No. Not yet." Tom didn't fight her embrace. He let himself go almost limp in her long, strong arms, and couldn't find it in himself to feel ashamed. _I'm all alone now. Mom, Dad, Robbie. I'm all fucking alone._ "I need to know what happened to him."

"Sazerac and his people will make a report—"

"No," Tom repeated, more forcefully. He drew away from Matheson. "There's something I need to tell you, Margaret. Something you need to know—"

His right shoulder. And Robert's. He told Matheson of the pain— seemingly without a clinical explanation, without a physical cause— that had shocked him awake two nights ago. A pain excruciating enough to make Tom feel as though his arm were being torn off, accompanied by a dream in which he was being suffocated.

Or drowned.

"That was when he died," Tom said, softly. "I know that now." He could feel Matheson watching him; he couldn't bring himself to look at her. "I didn't say anything before, Margaret; I'm sorry. I didn't want you to think that I was— that I was one of _them_."

"One of who, Tom?"

"One of those people. The ones we expose. The fakers. The ones who lie. And it would have sounded insane—"

"I know you're not insane." The light continued to fade from the room. Matheson reached to switch on the lamp on the bedside table. Then she looked at Tom, brushed a strand of hair away from his eyes. "And I know you don't lie."

Tom nodded, shaking.

"Maybe you should have something to eat, get some sleep." Matheson stood. "I'll see if Miss Patterson has anything on hand, okay?"

"Okay. Thanks, Margaret."

Matheson squeezed his shoulder, left the room. Tom tipped onto the bed, curled himself on his side. He heard the soft creak of the carpeted stairs as Matheson went down to the first floor. Other than that, he found himself surrounded by quiet. Tom closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. He stared at a white patch of wall opposite the bed, near the windows, and thought he could feel the nearly silent whisper of the firs seeping through the plaster and paint, right through his skin and into his bones.

#####

"Are you sleeping, Tom?" Matheson asked, when she returned a few minutes later. Her fingers were again on his shoulder, by way of inquiry, not a shaking.

"No. Just thinking." Tom sat up, rubbed his cheeks, feeling weariness in his long-day's stubble.

"Sympathy and homemade chowder." Matheson straightened away from the bed. "That's what Miss Patterson has to offer."

_Chowaduh_. The vernacular, all three syllables of it. "I want a hamburger," Tom said. "And I need a drink."

Matheson hesitated. Tom was in no shape to be out, and both of them knew it, but she didn't want to argue with him. "Okay." She went to the door. "Let me grab my jacket, and we'll see what we can find in town."

#####

They ended up at a place called The Shallows, at the base of the hill leading down to the shore and about two blocks south of Macready Point's main drag; they'd passed the Anchor Cafe, a homey-looking diner with white blinds at its north-facing windows, on their way, but the place had closed, according to a handwritten note taped to its door, slightly earlier than its eight-o'-clock usual for reasons of an unspecified emergency. Which was alright by Tom: he wanted a beer, not thin gravy and pre-packaged dinner rolls.

What he really wanted was a fight. Even if, at the moment, he didn't realize it.

#####

The Shallows was, like the Rocky Point, kitsch-free, sturdy, and clean for what it was, which is to say an establishment well above "dive" but nowhere near "classy." Pretty much everything, from the bar on out, was in heavy, knotted pine. Wall-mounted widescreens broadcast baseball games, soccer matches, and fishing shows. The place was comfortably busy, a solid crowd for a pre-weekend night; most of the patrons were gathered in raucous groups at the square tables on the floor. Tom and Matheson seated themselves in an empty booth against the south wall, away from the televisions; Tom was reading the beer list when the waitress arrived.

She was anywhere from a low-guess fifty to a could-retire-but-couldn't-stand-to-sit-still sixty-five. She'd dyed her hair to what likely was a fair approximation of the dark brown she'd lost to gray in her forties; her eyes were hazel and shrewd. She wore jeans and a blue t-shirt with _FISH OFF (At The Shallows)_ printed in cracked white across the front, and her forearms displayed a degree of muscle tone Tom didn't normally associate with middle-aged women.

"Heya, folks," she said. "I'm Kay. What can I bring you?"

Smuttynose appeared to be the micro-brew of choice in the area. "I'll have a porter," Tom said. "And a burger."

"Everything on that burger, honey?"

"Does 'everything' include cheese?"

"Sure does."

"Yep."

Kay had no pen, no carbon-pad. She kept her notes in her head. She turned her shrewd attention to Matheson. "And for you?"

Normally Matheson was the one to find the lone dinner salad in a place like this. A chef's salad and tea, plain, iced or hot, according to the weather.

"The same, please," she said to Kay.

#####

The beer came first; the burgers, Kay told them, would follow shortly. Matheson added a basket of onion rings to their order. While she and Tom waited for their food, they found themselves, as people beset by recent personal tragedy were wont to do, trying to put up a normal front in public. Said front was understandably quiet. Tom found himself, like Matheson, filling the atypical silence between them by listening in on the conversations at the other tables.

The loudest talk was taking place at a table about ten feet away, where two standing men in their late thirties or early forties, whom Tom by their accents took to be locals, were having a debate with the five twenty- and thirty-something guys seated at the table.

"I tell you, they know not to go into the pots," one of the locals was saying. He tipped the neck of his beer bottle at the table for emphasis. "They're _learning_."

This met with snorts and laughter from the men at the table. One of them, a beefy but muscular guy with a black mullet and at least two days' worth of rough black scruff on his face, leaned back in his chair. He, like a couple of his companions, wore a red t-shirt bearing the words _Crosley Dives_ over the image of a human skull wearing dive goggles.

_The wreckers,_ Tom thought.

The man with the mullet looked up at the guys who had to be locals. "It's a crustacean," he said to them, emphasizing each syllable as if for the benefit of the terminally slow. "It's a cockroach at the bottom of the ocean. It can't learn."

Matheson glanced from him to Tom. She sipped her beer, muttered: "Tell that to the roaches in my first apartment."

Fate or simple inevitability and the poorly timed silence: she spoke exactly into the gap between the wrecker's jeering statement and the locals' frowning non-response. Mullet looked over, focused on Tom.

"I thought you were dead," he said. His companions looked over, too. The locals eased away from the wreckers' table. "Nope: that must've been the other one," he continued. "You only _look_ dead."

It all happened that suddenly. Tom, machinelike, got up, eased out of the booth.

Matheson put out her hand. "Tom, don't—"

Tom ignored her. He turned to the man with the mullet, his face expressionless, the anger inside him a great and terrible emptiness, and—

Someone grabbed him from behind. A bear hug. Effortlessly powerful. A man's voice spoke in Tom's left ear: "There now, young fella."

The wrecker who'd insulted Tom moved as if to get up, to get in a cheap shot; the man holding Tom got his own shoulder between Tom and his would-be attacker and snapped: "Here, now. None of that."

One of the other wreckers, sandy-haired, with a broad and windburned face, put a hand on the shoulder of Tom's tormentor, kept him in his seat. The man holding Tom released him; Tom turned, found himself looking at the fellow who'd passed him and Matheson and Hollister on his way out of the Macready's Point clinic. The big, fair-haired man who'd called after Anne Cassidy.

"Tulley," the man said to Tom. He offered his right hand; Tom shook it. "Dick Tulley. You must be Tom Buckley. Doctor Buckley's brother."

Tom, shuddering, now, with the afterburn of adrenalin, merely nodded.

"Glad to know you." Tulley cast an assessing glance at the wreckers. For all apparent purposes, Tom was already forgotten at the divers' table: Mullet and his companions were again talking and joking over bottles of Miller while they presented a united front of broad backs and shoulders to the world about.

"Would you care to join us, Mr. Tulley?" Matheson asked.

"Think I will, at that. Thank you." Tulley took one more analytical look at the wreckers before seating himself, after Tom, in the booth. "Doctor— _Martinson_, is it?"

"Matheson."

"Ah. Apologies." Tulley winced amiably at his mistake as he and Matheson shook hands.

Matheson smiled. "Don't worry about it."

Kay approached, bearing two mountainous hamburgers on white stoneware plates and a red plastic basket piled high with golden onion rings. "Get you anything, Richard?" she asked Tulley, as she laid out the food.

"Got any coffee made within the past month, Kay?"

"Not that I'm aware."

Tulley gestured at Tom's beer bottle. "I'd best have a fresh one of these, then."

"You've got it."

When she'd gone, Tulley turned to Tom. "Let me say, first off, how sorry I am about your brother. That's a hell of a thing."

"Thank you." Tom's throat ached again, suddenly and harshly. He took a long swallow from his bottle of beer and tried but could find nothing more to say. He found himself focusing on his hamburger while, to his frustration and shame, tears welled in his eyes. _Not here. Not in front of those fucking wreckers, for fuck's sake_. "That's very, umm, kind of—"

Matheson looked from him to Tulley. "How's Miss Cassidy?"

"Annie...?" Tulley, with rough grace, allowed Matheson to draw his attention away from Tom. "Upset. Coping, I'd say. Got Kris Patterson staying out on Crow with her tonight. You're bunking up at the Rocky Point, am I right—?"

Matheson nodded as she picked slices of dill pickle from her hamburger, ate the first. "Mm hm."

"Nancy Patterson who runs the place: Kris is her sister. Owns the Anchor Inn, up in town."

"We saw, on our way here: she closed early tonight."

"Yep. Ran her out to the island, then stopped for my nightcap." Tulley nodded, smiled up at Kay when she came with his bottle of Smuttynose. "Thanks to ya, Kay."

"Say 'thanks' with a tip for once, Richard." Kay winked at him, then looked to Matheson and Tom. "You folks need anything else?"

"No," said Matheson. "We're good."

She watched Kay walk away, used it as an excuse to re-surveil the Crosley dive team. "Are there many wrecks in this area?" she asked Tulley.

"Wrecks all up an' down the coast," Tulley replied, taking the first sip of his beer.

"Anything of particular interest around here?"

"Well, you've always got your legends of gold," Tulley mused. "The theory being that the Nazis were running the stuff in and out of Canada during the war. Why? Hell, you've got me. Mostly, wreck divers are in it for the thrill of seeing something no one else can see. Sure, you get your artifact-hunters, your plunderers, but mostly it's down to who's got the biggest balls. If you'll pardon my saying so."

"Pardoned." Matheson nudged the basket of onion rings Tulley's way. "Help yourself."

Tulley reached for a ring. "Don't mind if I do." He added, more quietly, his attention still apparently on the red plastic basket and its deep-fried contents. "But there's a difference with this bunch."

Tom rejoined the conversation. He leaned forward slightly, quietly cleared his throat. "And what's that, Mr. Tulley?"

"Normally, fellas like these are totally independent. This time, they're not."

"Someone is paying them to look for something?" Matheson asked.

"Would appear so."

"Who?"

Tulley ate his onion ring, reached for another. "Who's writing their checks, you mean?"

"Yes."

"That I couldn't tell you. Got the usual assortment of speculators in town. Developers looking to build up the area, that sort. Chief Hollister's husband: he's in real estate. But someone who'd be looking to turn a profit off of things at the bottom of the sea: that I don't know."

"Mysteries," Matheson said, picking up her burger.

"Yep." Tulley drank more of his beer, set his bottle back on its card-stock coaster. "Something we've been wondering, Annie and me—" He hesitated, seemingly caught between caution and tact. "Devoted, that one," he said, finally. "Dedicated. She won't leave her post."

"She's probably in shock," Matheson offered, gently.

"Probably." Tulley smiled slightly, shrugged. "But she could just as well be in shock with someone driving her back to the cities. Here's what we wondering, the two of us." He caught Tom's eye, then Matheson's. Made certain of their attention before he placed his rough fingertips at the table's edge and said: "She and I were wondering why, if Doctor Buckley got himself hit by a tanker, his Zodiac didn't get hit, too."

"It didn't—?" Tom asked, frowning.

"Nope. Annie found it, overturned and adrift, the morning after the storm. Motor was missing, but no other damage. Would've been torn to shreds, going up against a salty."

"Maybe Robert was thrown out in the storm, and the Zodiac got away from him," Margaret suggested.

Tulley turned his his beer bottle between his fingers. "Maybe." A Maine catch to the word. _Mehbbe_.

"I want to talk to her," Tom said. "To Anne Cassidy."

Tulley shook his head. "Not tonight. I've made my last run for the day. And Annie needs her quiet."

"Tomorrow, then, Mr. Tulley?" Matheson asked.

"Tomorrow, then," Tulley said. He added, mostly to Matheson: "And you can feel free to call me by my Christian name, Doctor Matheson."

"If you in turn call me 'Margaret,' Mr. Tulley."

Tulley smiled wryly. "Done."

#####

He stayed to finish his second beer when Tom and Matheson left, Tom's half-formed, formerly half-angry thoughts of getting himself well and truly intoxicated having faded as his belly filled with food. Tully rose, though, as they left, an old-fashioned courtesy largely, Tom thought, for Matheson's benefit; he'd given them the location of his boat and a time for tomorrow's trip to Crow Island (nine o'clock seeming fair to the three of them— and Tully would call ahead to Anne Cassidy, to make sure the time was fair to _her_), and they again shook hands and parted ways.

Outside, the cool night air was that much cooler for their having spent time in the body-warmed space of the bar. The sky was a rich black generously sparked with stars; a three-quarter moon sat high above the ocean.

And two of the wreck-divers were standing behind the Bonneville.

As Tom and Matheson saw them and slowed, Tom found himself wondering— perhaps ridiculously, but there was no accounting for the intrusion of rational thought into situations calling only for the irrationality of survival instincts— what powers of deduction had led the men to target the Pontiac. Like Chief Hollister earlier that day, had they had a feeling about the car's New York plates...? Or did the old gray destroyer really shout "staid and dull: academic tag-team on the road" that loudly?

_The second one, probably,_ Tom thought, as he put himself a couple of steps ahead of Matheson.

"Hey," said one of the men, as he straightened away from the back of a silver Ford F-250 parked next to the Bonneville.

"What can we do for you, guys?" Tom replied, cautiously.

The man, like his companion, was not displaying aggressive or angry body language. Tom noted it; Matheson, as a psychologist, had to be noting it, too. No crossing of the arms at the chest, no hunched shoulders. No reaching for— or display of— weapons. No sudden movement toward Matheson and Tom.

"I, uh— We just wanted to apologize for Randy," the first man said. "Guy can be a real asshole."

It was then that Tom recognized him as the sunburned, sandy-haired guy who'd saved Tom from being sucker-punched earlier. No doubt the would-be sucker-puncher had been the loud-mouthed, eponymous Randy— who was presently nowhere to be seen.

"It's alright." Tom kept his eyes on the men as he shook his head. "No problem."

"He had no right saying what he said." The first man came a couple of steps toward Tom and Matheson. He stopped at a still-neutral distance; his eye contact was direct without being confrontational. He looked at Tom. "I'm Joe Everhart. I'm sorry for what happened to your brother. If there's anything I can do—"

He shrugged, went quiet.

"That's very kind," Matheson said, when Tom failed to respond. "Thank you."

She and Tom watched as Everhart and the other man got into the F-250 and drove away.

"It's been a long day," she said, half to herself, when they'd gone.

Tom nodded. Matheson still had the keys to the Bonneville; he kept mostly quiet as they drove back to the Rocky Point.

There, as they parked, a blue Volkswagen Passat and a black Honda CR-V having joined the Forester on the gravel square at the back of the house, he wondered for a moment if Anne Cassidy might be feeling as he felt: that her emotions were like embers blinking out one by one as they floated up into the black, starred sky.

#####

#####

When she was upset, Doctor Jessica Brand went clamming by moonlight. She was upset tonight. Not that the news of Tom Buckley's death would have been enough on its own to send her to the beach north of town, where the sandy bottom and the shallows both ran far enough out to make for good digging: not the news in itself, no, but the clash she'd had with Stephen Costas regarding Tom's brother and his friend, Doctor Matheson, showing up at the Happer Institute with questions and inquisitive eyes. Brand had taken with grace her share of ribbing from Costas and her other colleagues regarding her chosen area of study; that afternoon, however, after the living Doctor Buckley and Doctor Matheson had left the lab and Costas chastised her for leaving her research out for anyone to see, Brand had found herself bristling.

"What am I supposed to do: throw hoods over the tanks every time someone stops by?" Maybe it had been the shock of seeing that Robert had a twin; maybe it had been the haunted, troubled look in Tom Buckley's eyes, as if he knew, before the feeling became fact, that part of him was dead. Whatever the reason, Brand had turned to Costas and snapped: "They're _clams_, Steve, not secret weapons."

At that, Costas went uncharacteristically silent. He retreated, thin-lipped, to his closet of an office, and he and Brand didn't speak again for the rest of the day.

#####

So now, upset but not devastated (Costas was a bastard, and she'd accepted it for years, and she and Robert Buckley had been friends without being _friends_— even as kind, slightly goofy, and handsome, despite the beard, as he'd been— and she accepted that, too), Brand took her bucket and rake and headed down to the sandy shore north of Macready's Point.

She had the beach to herself. No surprise there: the residents of the Point weren't, in general, the type given to romantic walks in the moonlight, and the tourists the town attracted tended to be of the early-to-bed, early-to-be-up-fishing variety, not college kids looking to get wasted sitting around bonfires on the shore.

So Brand was alone with the water and the sand and the velvet night sky glorious with stars, and it was exactly what she needed. She walked across the sliding hiss of the surf and into the Atlantic, feeling the gentle tug of the water at her calves, the soft counter-buffet of the breeze on her shoulders. It was chilly, but not hypothermically so. Just hypnotic enough. Already relaxing, Brand started to dig.

She'd been out for about forty-five minutes, still comfortably warm, wet to the hips but not waterlogged, when she noticed a smooth dark ridge of rock glistening in the moonlight about sixty feet offshore, nearly submerged in what was maybe four or five feet of water. Brand decided to use it as a reference point for her progress relative to the beach.

She was out to the edge of her comfortable working depth, looking for more of the black-shell clams like the ones Tom Buckley had noticed when he visited the lab that afternoon, which seemed to prefer deeper waters near the shore (if the word "prefer" could ever be ascribed to what was, basically, a filtration pump residing in a hinged shell), when she glanced over and saw that the rock was gone.

Brand straightened, frowning as she looked. "What the heck—"

Something fleshy and cold wrapped itself her ankles and yanked her off her feet. Brand screamed as she fell, thrashing in panic; she sucked a mouthful of salt water into her lungs and choked as she was dragged under. Dragged out to sea.

And torn apart along the way.

#####

#####

#####


	6. Chapter Three: Tom and Book

About-dang-time, isn't it...? Sorry, and sorry again, for the delay. The usual excuses, and at least one that's not-so-usual: Work, more work, work, random acts of inertia, work, and a bit of overseas travel. Here's a double-stuffed pile of nonsense to make up for it. Thanks for your patience— and for tuning back in...!

#####

#####

**Chapter Three: Tom and Book**

She survived the night. She actually slept, at least for a couple of hours, and she didn't dream of him. But what woke Anne Cassidy was Robert Buckley's scent in her nostrils: for a second her entire being flooded with blind joy, an animal hope, that yesterday had been this last night's nightmare, nothing more, that she'd imagined Dick Tulley's bad news, the trip to the mainland, colliding with Robert's clean-shaven doppelganger in the hall of the clinic, and then seeing Robert himself, drowned and pale and cold—

She opened her eyes to find that she'd shifted in her sleep: she was on the side of the bed that he'd claimed as his, and her face was pressed to his pillow. His scent was still on the pillowcase.

Anger, then. At herself, at her weakness, at the situation. At him. She'd never fallen for someone this hard, this quickly, and that made her a fool; he, in turn, was a bastard for getting himself killed. He was gone. _Fuck him._ The sun was shining through the old bone-lace curtains: she didn't know the time, but it was morning, and she had to get up. She had work to do. She'd wash the sheets and be done with him.

She took his pillow and hugged it to her chest. Rolled on to her side and quietly started to cry—

A soft knock at the doorframe of the keeper's room. A woman's voice, tactfully hesitant: "Annie? You awake?"

Kris Patterson. Dick Tulley had brought her along yesterday evening, he and Kris both insisting after he and Cassidy stopped at the Anchor Cafe for coffee and a roast-beef dinner that Cassidy barely touched, to stay the night on Crow Island. As if Cassidy needed watching. As if grief would turn that quickly to recklessness and extremity and she would throw herself from the cliff at the island's north end. And as if Book wouldn't be right there to fish her out again— and again after that, if need be— if she did.

Now, Cassidy exhaled slowly. Steadied her breathing and called over her shoulder: "Yeah, Kris, I'm awake."

"Dick Tulley called up on the radio." Kris's voice, a husky mumble at the best of times, held an extra note of respectful hush. Cassidy could picture her, stocky and solid, her pepper-and-salt hair cropped efficiently close to her skull, Macready Point's most unshakeable spinster, lurking just outside the door; while Kris had been at ease down below, and more than willing to make do bunking on the sofa in the living area, she seemed to harbor an old-fashioned shyness when it came to crossing into someone else's private space. "Got a couple of visitors he's running out to the island. Some doctor— name of Martinson, I think. And a Tom Buckley. Dr. Buckley's brother. Said they'd be here around ten."

Cassidy fixed her eyes on the wall next to Robert's side of the bed. "Thanks, Kris. I'll be down in a couple of minutes."

"No rush, Annie. It's just gone nine."

#####

Something wasn't right. Well, in a way, at this point in time, everything was wrong— and here Cassidy, as she got up (she'd slept in her clothes, ticking mechanically through her nightly inspection checklist once Tulley had left her and Kris on the island, then kicking off her boots, walking upstairs, and falling into bed), felt another stab of anger and grief— and, really, how alike the two emotions were: the deepest, most-awful betrayal sharing a continuum with the most-profound sense of loss. A lethal combination if ever there had been one.

Still, right now, something specifically was off, was missing; and, once Cassidy had let the shower wash the tears from her cheeks and her stinging eyes and had dressed in clean clothes, she went downstairs and asked of Kris, who was in the kitchen, frying eggs:

"Where's Book?"

Kris ran the tapered edge of a steel spatula along a lip of sputtering egg-white. "He pawed to go out about an hour ago. Haven't seen him since."

Cassidy looked to the dog's bowls, sitting on the floor next to the entrance from the mud room. His food and water were untouched. Something lurched in her chest—

"I'll be right back, Kris," she said.

She put on her boots and took her jacket and stepped out into the morning air. The night's shadows had surrendered to the sun, but chill lingered: it took time for the island's rocks to warm.

"Book!" Cassidy shouted. "Book: here—!"

Nothing. No movement. Only the sun glaring coolly from its mid-angle over the eastern horizon, a smattering of clouds in the pale sky. A breeze from the north and the station's white outbuildings below. The lighthouse itself jutting up toward the heavens, casting a long, tall shadow back toward the keeper's house.

Sometimes he took to the highlands, Book did, when he wanted solitude. (Or to chase gulls and nesting rooks from the rocks, a stalking game at which, given his size and bulk, he was surprisingly adept.) Cassidy, a growing fear crowding her heart, started up the path, leading past a determined stand of firs that had claimed the center of the island, circling up to the rock-jumbled cliffhead at the island's northernmost point.

A roar of engines in the near distance, to her right: the wreckers on their boat, bouncing past through the chop, bellowing their usual lewd good-mornings. Cassidy ignored them.

"Book—!" she shouted, again, pausing so as to mind her footing on the path. The cautions one adopted when one was accustomed to living alone in a semi-treacherous setting.

No response. Nothing. The sound of the wreckers' boat-engines faded into the northerly breeze.

#####

#####

He'd slept. A heavy, uncomfortable four hours' worth: he woke, a soreness through his shoulders, feeling as though he hauled himself from cold water and dropped, exhausted, on a rocky shore. This, despite the good mattress of the bed in his room, the cozy warmth of the down comforter. Tom Buckley opened his eyes before the alarm from his folding travel clock could pipe him awake; it was seven fifty-six. Tom showered and dressed and went downstairs to find Matheson and Nancy Patterson seated at the kitchen table, coffee mugs at their elbows, a plate of rolls between them. When he appeared in the doorway, they stopped their conversation— he'd caught talk of the town and region, in bits and pieces, as he came down the stairs— and looked at him with both concern and gentle surprise, as if he were a benevolent spirit they'd managed to disturb.

"Morning, Tom," Matheson said.

"Good morning, Margaret."

Nancy got up from the table and went to the coffee maker on the kitchen counter. She poured a gray stoneware mugful and handed it to Tom. "Get any sleep, Doctor Buckley?"

"Thank you; yes, I did." Tom nodded, offering her half a lie and what had to have been a ghost's smile, as he took the mug.

"You're between rushes down here. The early ones have come and gone; the latecomers'll be down at ten, asking after scraps." Nancy pulled out a wood-frame chair for him. "Have a seat."

"The corn muffins are particularly good," Matheson said, her dark eyes on him casually but directly, as Tom sat down.

In other words, they wouldn't be leaving until she'd seen him eat something. Tom reached for a muffin and a plate.

#####

As they'd hit the lull between the early risers and the stragglers for breakfast at the Rocky Point, Tom and Matheson found themselves similarly between shifts when they parked the Pontiac behind Pier Nine at the Macready's Point waterfront. The town's commercial fisherfolk had already headed out, no doubt hours ago; a handful of tourists were readying sailboats and other small craft, or setting up their gear on chartered fishing boats. Around the docks, gulls perched on heavy pilings, watching the humans and their doings with keen beady eyes. A breeze blew from the north; the sun sparkled on the water. Unless Tom very much missed his guess, it was winding up to be a beautiful day.

Dick Tulley's boat, the _Fallen Angel,_ was where Tulley had said it would be, tied up, space fore and aft, midway along the pier; Tulley himself was leaning against a piling, watching a group of kids prep a sailboat across the way as he drank what was apt to be coffee from a white mug. Tom had the feeling, as he and Matheson stepped out onto the dock, that they were catching Tulley already midway through his working day, that he'd likely been up for hours, rising before dawn to check or set nets or lobster traps, and that running people and cargo out to Crow Island constituted his second set of daily duties.

Not that he seemed to mind. His grin, when he saw Tom and Matheson approaching along the pier, was genuine; he straightened away from the piling on which he'd been leaning and called: "Good morning, there."

Matheson, walking beside Tom, smiled and called back: "Good morning."

Tulley cast the dregs of his coffee into the water, offered his free hand to Matheson. "Mind your step. Still a bit of dew underfoot."

Matheson took Tulley's hand, stepped on board his boat. Tom, smiling slightly to himself, followed.

"Need a hand with the lines?" he asked Tulley.

"Thank you, Doctor Buckley: no." Practically beaming, Tulley freed his boat from her moorings. He stepped on board, went to the helm and fired up the engines, and, just shy of nine-thirty in the morning, they got underway.

#####

He wasn't a sailor, but he wasn't prone to seasickness, and the surface of the ocean on this sunny morning was nothing more than breeze-rippled anyway: Tom found himself, if anything, frankly grateful to be out in the open air, away from the darkness woven into the spruce needles of Macready's Point. Away, too, from thoughts of another darkness: that of the mortuary freezer in which Robert had spent last night.

For a moment, sadness crowded into Tom's throat like a solid, choking fistful of tears; he gasped at the suddenness of it, his breath catching, and leaned for support against the railing at the fore of the boat, where he'd decided to stand on the ride out to the island. The feeling passed, and with it the threat of tears, leaving Tom feeling less ashamed than amazed; grief constituted a new aspect to his existence, a side of himself with which he'd have to learn to live: for now, at least, this awful stranger in his life would be at times overpowering, and he had to accept that fact.

Or so Margaret would tell him. The stages of grief and all that. Tom stole a look over his shoulder, toward the open-sided wheelhouse, where Matheson was talking with Tulley, their voices lost to the sound of the wind and water, the solid drone of the engines. Tom knew she was hovering-but-not, keeping an eye on him even as she gave him some space.

Tom turned his attention back out to sea. Crow Island lay to the southeast; Tom found himself looking north, toward the blue haze of the eastern horizon. At first, he wasn't sure why—

And then he heard it: a sound like the shrieking of gulls, pitched softly but insistently above the roar of the engines. No gulls had followed the _Fallen Angel_ from shore; weirdly, too, something told Tom, from well back in the subconscious regions of his instincts, that what he was hearing wasn't birds at all.

He frowned out at the water, staring, straining his ears. Off the port bow, at a distance of a hundred and fifty yards or so, he spotted what appeared to be a small shoal of gray rock, glistening in the sun.

Tom turned, called back toward the wheelhouse: "How deep is the water here, Tulley?"

"Hundred feet, give or take," Tulley called back. "We're not about to bottom out, if that's what you're askin'."

"Then what's that—?" Tom asked, pointing toward the shoal.

Tulley squinted his eyes against the sun, looking where Tom was pointing. "What's what?"

"That—"

Tom turned back toward the water. Stared. The shoal was gone. So, too, was the sound of shrieking gulls.

#####

Book was alive and well, and Cassidy found him where she thought she would: on the northpoint headlands. Only he wasn't chasing birds. He was standing on a shelf of rock, looking out to sea. His head was down. The black fur along his broad shoulders was bristling.

And he was growling out at the water to the north.

Her relief at finding him turning to a low, cold dread, Cassidy slowed as she approached him.

"Book...?" she said, cautiously.

He ignored her, still staring out at the eastern horizon. The growling continued to rumble from his chest.

Cassidy said, more firmly: "Book."

He looked at her then, and tension seemed to melt from his body. He stopped growling, leaped down off the rock shelf, came to meet her.

Then he tensed again, looking as well as listening, this time in the direction of the jetty. He bounded off down the stony path, barking. A minute later, Cassidy, following him, heard a distant gurgling of engines.

Book was already on the dock, waiting, when the _Fallen Angel_ hove into view.

#####

#####

For over an hour, the wreckers of Crosley Dives, having greeted the lovely keeper of the Crow Island light on their way out to sea, had been at work in the depths.

At the bottom of the ocean, in silty cold and darkness, Joe Everhart, one of the few members of Randy Crosley's team who _hadn't_ offered profane salutations to Anne Cassidy, waited. One of Everhart's strongest personality traits, besides an almost old-fashioned decorum towards women, was patience; as a man exploring the ocean in modern times, he possessed equipment capable of validating said patience: the mixture of gases in his air tanks technically kept at bay the threat of depth narcosis. Still, literally, he was an animal well out of his depth, a fact his mammalian brain was only too willing to acknowledge. To keep his mind from being pulled astray by the insidious, ever-present tug of depth-terrors, tri-mix or no, Everhart ran facts.

Facts: He was standing inside the breached hull of a United States Navy Liberty ship, just aft of the number-one hold. Said ship lay on her port side in two hundred and three feet of water, at a June temperature of forty degrees Fahrenheit, twelve miles off the coast of Maine, near the town of Macready's Point. The nearest dry land mass was Devil's Island, four miles to the southwest. Joe was standing watch as Randy Crosley, their team's leader and most-experienced diver, worked his way forward, past wreckage, the treacherous snags and twistings of rusted steel, into the number-one hold itself. The other six members of the team, working in pairs, were exploring the crew quarters and common areas amidship, taking pictures, possibly collecting the odd souvenir. Personal effects of the ship's crew were, of course, off-limits— the site, after all, had likely been a final resting ground for most of them, even if the currents and marine life had long ago carried away or devoured their earthly remains— but there was always the prospect of a portable piece of hardware that had escaped corrosion, a cup or plate from the ship's mess.

Only it was with the plates that the facts ended. Or, to put it another way, one fact regarding this ship overrode all the rest: She was an enigma.

She may— or may not— have been the _SS Patrick Murphy,_ bound for Liverpool from New York with a cargo of iodine, cotton and other textiles, medical supplies, and machine parts. Only the portion of her bow not buried in muck showed no painted name to that effect. No name at all, as a matter of fact. Six rusted holes showed where a name plate might have been riveted to her bow; the plate, if it had ever actually existed, was gone.

She had been steaming north, not east, when she sank on November 17, 1942.

And, most mysterious— or awful— of all, she hadn't met her demise as the result of a storm splitting open a stress-fracture in her hull. She'd been torpedoed.

Five days ago, Joe Everhart, half-swimming and half-stepping his way along the ship's hull with Crosley, minding their anchoring lines while the Atlantic currents buffeted the insulated neoprene of their wetsuits, had looked with stunned realization— and a degree of horrified exhilaration as well— at the telltale shape of the gash in the ship's side. A bursting, not a tearing, the violence of it still apparent even after all these long, cold, rusting years on the bottom. Twelve miles off the coast of Maine.

_An explosion in the middle of a storm,_ Everhart had thought. _From shore, it might have sounded like thunder._

Now he waited for Crosley to finish his forward sweep. He was the steady man, Everhart was, the team's go-to guy. A good match for a hotdogger like Randy, who possessed recklessness as well as vision and bravery. Everhart was content to watch out for his fellow divers, to mind Randy's anchor-line as the leader of Crosley Dives worked his way into the forwardmost of the Liberty ship's holds, and to keep his own movement to a minimum, to avoid stirring up a cloud of silt that could in seconds eradicate the already limited visibility here at the bottom.

As for what Randy hoped to find in that forward hold, Everhart had no idea. _Mysteries_. He ran his right hand, warm enough in its three-fingered cold-water dive glove, along Crosley's anchor line, testing the tension. No snags, no tugs for help. As long as Crosley's secrets didn't endanger the team, Everhart figured, he was entitled to them—

That was when Everhart saw movement, to his peripheral right, through the squared glass of his dive mask.

#####

#####

Anne Cassidy met her visitors from the mainland with all the sober dignity of the designated ruler of a tiny island nation come to greet an unwanted diplomatic delegation from a rival considered neutral at best. At the Crow Island jetty, she went efficiently through the motions of tying off the _Fallen Angel_'s dock-lines; in a weathered blue oilcloth jacket over a maroon henley, work boots, and jeans, the breeze toying with her dark pony tail, she looked frail but capable. She accepted a hug by way of greeting from Dick Tulley.

"How're you keepin' this morning, Annie...?" he asked.

"Well enough, Dick; thank you."

She turned, next, to Matheson, extended her right hand. "Doctor— Kris said it was 'Martinson'; something tells me that isn't right—"

Margaret smiled knowingly as she took Cassidy's hand. She was nearly a head taller than the younger woman. "It's 'Matheson,' actually. But you can call me Margaret. It's nice to meet you, Miss Cassidy."

Anne Cassidy nodded, smiling slightly, in acknowledgment, and moved on to Tom. Or she would have, if something hadn't planted itself between them.

That something was a giant black Newfoundland, some hundred and sixty pounds of him, who was alternately licking Tom's hands, swatting him with a tail like a feathered billy club, and affectionately bumping his bulky withers and sides into Tom's legs with force enough to constitute a clear and present danger to Tom's continued presence on the jetty. The creature was practically quivering like a puppy. Tom liked dogs, and he was good around them, but this show of adoration was nothing short of befuddling.

Until he realized, with his fingers stroking deep into the thick fur on the dog's side: _Oh, my God, he thinks I'm Robert_.

He looked up, stunned and practically guilt-stricken, to find Anne Cassidy, an identical realization in her brown eyes, looking back at him.

"Doctor Buckley...?" she said. Tom straightened, took the hand she offered. Anne Cassidy kept her expression neutral. She had features that erred on the side of practicality rather than outright delicacy, and her skin was makeup-free, slightly windburned. Her grip was bravely firm; her eyes didn't waiver from Tom's. "I want to apologize for yesterday."

"It's quite alright, Miss Cassidy." Tom kept his gaze as even as hers. He was shaking. He could feel her shaking, too. "Thank you for meeting us."

"Not at all." Cassidy released him, turned to include Matheson and Tulley in her line of sight. "Come on up to the house."

#####

#####

At first, Joe Everhart thought it was a fish. A grouper, possibly a ray, drawn to the glow of his dive lamp. Not a shark: they usually stayed a hundred feet higher up or better, dogging schools of cod or shad. He turned toward the motion to his right, keeping his own movements slow, so as not to kick up silt, and saw—

— nothing. Or not-quite-nothing: a sort of flurry, a moment of rough gray roiling, at the edge of the lamp's glow. Then stillness.

Everhart could feel his heart pounding. He steadied his breathing and again tallied facts. Fact one: for even the most experienced diver, even one breathing tri-mix rather than old-school oxygen, depth terrors were a very real possibility. Standing still as he'd been, he'd accumulated a concentration of carbon dioxide in his lungs. Everhart pushed his next three breaths out with steady force as he calmly surveyed the undersea world his lamp revealed. The ruined, corrosion-encrusted landscape of hold number two. Bits of flotsam drifting to and fro, sheltered by the hull from the area's strong bottom-currents. Crosley's anchor-line, seeming to glow in the light as it led forward, into the murk.

Everhart checked the glowing face of his chronometer-slant-dive computer. Another four minutes or so, and they were due to head to the surface, a double handful of decompression stops along the way. Likely the rest of the team were already on their way up; Tim Mahoney, who'd stayed behind with Everhart last night at The Shallows when Everhart had wanted to apologize to dead Doctor Buckley's brother for Randy Crosley's behavior, would be among them. He was a good man and a good friend: he'd be keeping an eye down along the surface-line for Everhart and Crosley, who— after another couple hundred seconds, give or take— would— or wouldn't— have found what he was looking for.

So: three and a half minutes, now, tops. Nothing moving. All was well.

Something huge hit Everhart hard from behind.

#####

#####

Anne Cassidy, with Book beside her and Tom walking slightly behind— though Book doubled back every few steps to make sure that Tom was, indeed, following— led the way up to the keeper's house. Tom noted, again, that Matheson, walking with Tulley, was hanging slightly back, watching him. Not matchmaking— he would certainly hope that that was as far from her mind as it was from his— but observing Tom, noting how he interacted with Anne Cassidy. Tom didn't mind: in his present emotional state, he was far more suited to being a subject of study than a professional skeptic. He couldn't help but note, though, how Dick Tulley seemed to be profiting from Matheson's casually redirected attention. _Fine and good,_ Tom thought, half-smiling to himself. Even if Margaret, a feminist of the old school, might deny it, she deserved a touch of gallantry in her life.

True awkwardness ensued when they reached the keeper's house and went inside. Nancy Patterson's sister, Kris, was waiting, with offers of coffee and breakfast, the former accepted, the latter politely declined; the five of them ended up seated, in semi-silence, on the worn sofa and chairs in the house's living area, the sunshine through the wide east-facing windows seeming to bathe the lot of them in a dust-moted spotlight. Matheson, politely professional, opened the conversation with questions to Anne Cassidy regarding Crow Island and the light station and how she'd come to be keeper of the place; Tom, to his growing discomfort, found himself unable to speak.

_I'm wasting my time,_ he thought, looking beyond his knees to his booted feet, where, to his embarrassment, Book had curled up and contentedly parked himself and was presently lying with his muzzle nestled on his crossed front paws. _My time and Tulley's and Margaret's. Miss Cassidy's, too. We shouldn't have come here; we should go—_

It was then, as Matheson's line of questioning, like Tom's certitude, guttered and died, that Tulley asked: "Might I show Doctor Matheson the light, Annie...?"

A moment of silence. Then, absolutely droll, Margaret said: "I beg your pardon, Mr. Tulley...?"

A pause. Then a quiet snort from Kris Patterson. Tom joined in the general chuckling that followed.

"Don't mess with anything, Dick," Cassidy said, an amiable warning in her expression, as Tulley and Matheson stood.

"I know, I know: I break it, you have to fix it." Tulley grinned. To Matheson, he said, as they headed out: "Not afraid of heights, are you, Margaret...?"

"That depends, Dick," Matheson replied. "Will you be there to catch me if I fall...?"

Tulley's reply, if there was one, fell outside of Tom's range of hearing. He smiled nonetheless, reaching to scratch Book's head.

Anne Cassidy boosted herself up from the chair in which she'd been seated, to Tom's left. "Would you like a tour of the island, Doctor Buckley?"

She looked friendly enough when she spoke, but her tone was not unlike that of a priest offering a condemned man one last chance for confession. Buckley nodded, trying a polite smile in turn. If nothing else, he needed the air.

"Lead the way, Miss Cassidy," he said.

#####

#####

Some seven miles to the northeast, at the bottom of the ocean, while rationality fought pure animal terror for control of his mind, Joe Everhart did battle with a monster.

It was tearing at him while it crushed him, with claws or teeth: in the boiling darkness, he couldn't be certain which. Not that it mattered: he was dying, he was already dead, and he knew it. He was clawing for the dive-knife sheathed at his utility belt when his rebreather gave out; then, as his suit ripped, and the flesh beneath the neoprene tore, too, in electric, salt-charged spasms of pain, he tried to reach his octopus, his backup air. With the fingers of his right hand closing on the handle of his knife and his tri-mix hissing away to nothing, Everhart saw two last things before his lamp gave out. The first was an eye, a horrible, huge, light-dead eye, less than two feet from his face.

Flailing helplessly, Joe Everhart hadn't air enough to scream. His anchor-line caught on one of a thousand sharp edges in the ship's rotted hold. Caught, frayed, and snapped. In the crushing, sinuous embrace of a nightmare, Everhart was swept out of the guts of a torpedoed mystery-ship and borne away by the powerful bottom-currents of the Atlantic Ocean.

The second— and last— thing he saw, as he stabbed helplessly with his dive knife at the muscular coils crushing his torso, was something illuminated with light from the forward hold, dim and growing dimmer with distance in the absolute darkness—

Randy Crosley. Watching.

#####

#####

Cassidy needed the air as well. She had never minded being as much as trapped on the island, but now the house seemed stifling. With Tom Buckley and Book behind her, she led the way through the kitchen, where Kris Patterson was already busying herself with some sort of gastronomical alchemy, out into the strengthening mid-morning sunlight; then, a dozen paces from the house, seeing that Dick Tulley and Margaret Matheson were already out of sight, and watching how Book was taking, in big-hearted, puppyish eagerness, to this strange Buckley, she found it in herself to be blunt. She turned on him and asked flat-out: "Why are you here, Doctor Buckley? Anything you could want to know you might have learned from Chief Hollister or Dick or Doctor Sazerac."

_True enough,_ Buckley's expression said. A pursing of his full lips, a slight widening of his pale eyes. Like a little boy who'd been caught in a lie, and who was trying to hide the fact that he _knew_ he'd been caught. Cassidy had seen exactly the same expression in Robert Buckley's eyes the night she'd lit into him for nearly getting himself drowned. Seeing that expression now in his brother's face sent a sudden, sharp ache through her chest.

"I guess I wanted to see you," Tom Buckley replied. In Robert's voice, only not quite. More _city_ in this Buckley's accent.

In the difference, Cassidy found a source of bitter calm. "So you've seen me," she said. "Now what?"

"Miss Cassidy, I'm not trying to upset you—"

"Doctor Buckley," she replied, perhaps more sharply than she'd intended, "do you think you have any choice in the matter?" Tom Buckley stared at her; she continued: "I look at you; I see _him_. That much must be obvious."

At this, Buckley seemed openly shocked. Until now, perhaps out of grief, he'd come across as slightly oblivious; now he looked stunned at what appeared to be a revelation. "Miss Cassidy," he stammered, "I'm sorry. I'm so very sorry."

He stopped speaking, looked away. And then, that suddenly, Cassidy was horrified at herself. Appalled. _The man just lost his brother, for God's sake_.

He was here simply because he wanted to know something about the woman with whom his brother had spent a good deal of his final days. Through the fog of her own unhappiness, Cassidy had been too selfish to see that. Perhaps, too, Tom Buckley envied her time with Robert; more likely, though, he'd come to Crow Island out of a simple, elemental need for closure.

Cassidy touched his arm. "You have to realize," she said, more softly, now speaking carefully around a traitorous aching in her throat, "we didn't have a chance to grow tired of one another. We hadn't had our first real fight. The night he nearly drowned himself, I was angry, but— but—"

Tom Buckley put his hand— Robert's square, strong hand— over hers. "Tell me," he said, gently. "Please."

_Identical twins_. Robert hadn't said a word about Tom being his double. Cassidy's body betrayed her: she trembled slightly at Tom's touch. She gestured toward the highland trail, using the motion as an excuse to break contact between Buckley and herself.

"Let's walk," she said.

She led; Buckley and Book followed. Cassidy spoke half over her shoulder: "That night, he was bound for the mainland from Devil's—"

"Pardon me—" Tom Buckley interjected. "— 'Devil's'—?"

"Devil's Island," Cassidy said, as they started their way up the trail. Dragonflies buzzed and darted, snatching gnats from the warming breeze. "The outermost island in the local chain."

"Inhabited?"

"No. It was part of his sample-collection schedule— You know about his work, right...?"

"Yes."

"He was due to go from Devil's to here, then back to shore. The motor on his boat was giving him grief, the wind was getting up, and he decided to stop here, when—"

"When what—?"

"His motor failed below the north cliff, and Book and I rescued him. The sea was bad; he had no way back to the mainland. He stayed the night on the island."

"He stayed with _you_," Buckley clarified.

Cassidy stopped hiking, turned to look at him. Tom Buckley's expression was open, unaccusing.

"Yes," Cassidy said. "That night, and practically every night after that."

No need for the tender details: even without a twin's intuition, Tom Buckley could fill them in for himself. He asked: "Was he happy?"

"Yes. I think so."

Tom met her eyes. "Were you?"

Cassidy nodded. Abruptly she was rendered mute. If she said the word— one simple, truthful _yes—_ out loud, she would start to cry. She and Tom stood for a moment, silently, communal but uncertain in their shared grief—

"It's clear enough today: we should be able to see Devil's from the cliffs," she said. "This way."

She hiked off, northeast, along the trail. She didn't wait to see if Tom Buckley was following. For the moment, again, she couldn't bear to look at him, to see Robert's face in his.

They didn't speak again until they reached the northpoint cliffs; there, as they looked out to sea, with Devil's Island visible, in fact, as a low reddish-brown ridge on the eastern horizon, Cassidy asked, as Tulley had asked Doctor Matheson, as Tom Buckley hung back one wide pace from the edge:

"Are you afraid of heights, Doctor Buckley?"

"Not particularly, no."

Still, he looked as though he were poised to do something. To grab her, perhaps, to pull her back.

"Are you afraid I might jump?" she asked. Before Tom could reply, Cassidy answered herself, saying out loud what she'd thought to herself earlier: "Book would only haul me back in again. And again after that, if he had to."

"_I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,_" Tom said, quietly.

Called back to the present, Cassidy nodded. "Robert liked Ellison, too."

"I know—"

He stopped speaking. Seemed, suddenly, to sink into himself. Cassidy again put her hand on his arm, felt him shaking. As she watched, beads of sweat formed on his forehead.

"What is it—?" she asked.

He wouldn't look at her. "Nothing—"

"Doctor Buckley—"

"They'll be starting the autopsy soon." Tom's voice was nearly lost to the wind. His left hand crept to his right shoulder. As if he were making sure that his arm was still there. He seemed to be staring at something, just beyond the cliff's edge, that Cassidy couldn't see.

"Look at me," Cassidy said. She might have had her own moment of madness a minute ago, but Cassidy had been alone too long, and she was a pragmatist. She knew the importance of keeping oneself together, especially at great and rocky-bottomed heights. "Doctor Buckley, please—"

He ignored her. His eyes were as clear as bottle-glass in the light; his gaze was growing distant. Cassidy took him by the shoulders and shook him. "Tom."

"What—?"

"Are you alright?"

"Yes. Of course."

"Maybe we should be heading back. Tulley will be wondering where we've wandered off to."

Tom smiled, though it wavered slightly at the corners of his mouth. "On an island the size of this?"

Cassidy smiled back at him. "You'd be amazed at what you can get up to on an island the size of this. Come on."

Before they turned away from the cliff, Tom paused, took one last look at the horizon. "That's Devil's, isn't it—?"

He spoke to himself, the wind, and the light-filled air. Book waited, tail wagging, to lead him back down the trail. Cassidy followed.

#####

#####

Randy Crosley had waited to begin his ascent. Just a minute or two past the alarm flashing red on his wrist chronometer. Just long enough for whatever it had been to sweep Joe Everhart to his death.

Just long enough so that Crosley himself could move without giving in to the terror in his own mind.

He thought he was in the clear. His staging stops— nearly an hour's worth of them— gave him time to formulate a lie. He got to the surface with his story in place. When Tim Mahoney and the boat crew hauled him aboard, he had only to half-fake a panicked exhaustion— "I was thirty feet into the first hold," he gasped, as Mahoney helped him with his mask and his weights and his tanks. "When I came out, Joe was gone. Just gone. He must have stepped out into the current—"

— and then, from the bow, someone shouted: "Emergency flasher starboard! Look—!"

Southward. Maybe a half-mile away, maybe slightly less than that: the star-bright blink of an LED against the blue-gray waves. Crosley stared at the light as the dive-boat's engines rumbled to life.

#####

They dragged Joe Everhart from the water a dying man. His weight-belt was gone; he'd bolted for the surface without making his staging stops; he had the bends. His suit had been slashed as if by a maelstrom of claws; his face mask was full of blood. When they removed it, he was foaming at the mouth. The sclerae of his staring eyes were a solid ichor red. As Tim Mahoney and several of the others wrestled his flailing body to the deck and tried to get an oxygen mask on him, as others of the crew called the Coast Guard for a med-evac helicopter, Everhart screamed, begged Mahoney to kill him, babbled things that made no sense.

Among his rantings was a word that may or may not have been _monster_.

#####

#####

Tom Buckley looked back at Crow Island, receding in the _Fallen Angel's_ wake.

Anne Cassidy had managed to send her visitors on their way without hosting them for lunch— or, more specifically, Tom surmised, without allowing Kris Patterson again to lay claim to the kitchen in the keeper's house. Another front was moving in from the north, according to the weather reports; Cassidy needed Tulley and his people gone. Or needed to know that they were safely back on their way back to the mainland. One of the two.

In any case, Tom felt morose and not a little frustrated. He wasn't sure what he'd hoped to learn on the island; worse, he was certain, now, that not only had he wasted Anne Cassidy's time, but that he'd come off as a certifiable lunatic in her eyes.

The breeze of earlier was building to a northerly wind. Tom turned his face to it and asked: "What's next—?"

Kris Patterson was forward, in the bow, looking toward Macready's Point; Matheson was standing beside Tom in the stern. She replied, sensible as always: "The chamber of commerce, for background on the area? Maybe there's a local museum—"

A chopping roar from the seaward distance. A red-and-white Coast Guard medical helicopter approached, flew overhead, then turned and swept south along the coast. Tulley reached for the radio handset.

"Diver with the bends," he called to Matheson and Tom, a minute or so later. "One of the wreckers. They're taking him down to Portland. Got a hyperbaric chamber at the hospital there. They were working in some two hundred feet of water, and he came up without making his staging stops. Macready's Point dispatch says he's in bad shape."

Tom looked back the way the chopper had come.

"Where were they when it happened?" he asked Tulley. "Did they say?"

"Four miles and a bit northeast of Devil's Island."

Tom scowled in frustration in the direction of Devil's, well out of sight on the clouding horizon. For a second he experienced a ghost of what he'd felt standing on the clifftop with Anne Cassidy. Not vertigo, exactly, but something akin to it. A sense that he— or someone else— was standing beyond him, outside himself, leading him on. "It's _there_," he said to Matheson. "It's that island, Margaret."

"We can read up, research the place. Check the archives of the local paper, maybe— or a library—"

"Or you could ask Dan Shellberg," Tulley called, laconically, over the sound of the engines. "He's sort of an unspoken expert on local nautical lore. Long as you don't use the 'n' word— and don't tell Fran Hollister I told you that— you should be fine."

Matheson turned to him with a perplexed half-frown. "The 'n' word, Dick...?"

#####

#####

Though Tulley provided directions to Dan Shellberg's house, Tom and Matheson did the tactful thing and stopped by the police station on the way to his place. Shellberg wasn't there— it was, as Tulley had predicted, his afternoon off— but their visit gave Fran Hollister a polite heads-up as to their intentions. She spoke with them in the spare confines of her office.

"I'll tell you flat out: Dan's uncle served in the German submarine service in World War II," she said. "If you're going to be asking him things, I need to know that you're doing it out of genuine need, not with the intent of harassing one of my people. Dan's a good man, he's a good officer, and he's a friend—"

"We know he's not a Nazi, Fran," Matheson said.

"In the war, people served honorably on both sides, you understand?"

Tom nodded. "We understand."

#####

Shellberg's place was less than two miles from the police station, at the oak-lined summit of another avenue leading down to the waterfront. Shingled in pale green, the house was what seemed to be standard issue for the area: two stories plus a gabled attic, an all-season porch, a screen door that emitted a soft metallic squeak when Dan Shellberg opened it for them.

"It's good of you to see us, Mr. Shellberg," Matheson said, as Shellberg ushered her and Tom inside. As a sort of concession to Chief Hollister's tactful concerns, they'd allowed her to call ahead and let Shellberg know they were coming. "We understand it's your afternoon off: we won't keep you—"

A gentle, gaunt smile, a casual wave of a long-fingered hand. "Frances worries too much for me," Shellberg said. "This is no bother at all."

He showed them to comfortably stuffed mohair chairs in a south-facing parlor decorated with framed photos, many in black and white, showing softball teams (probably the Macready's Point police team, Tom thought, in iterations spanning some forty years), anglers posing with their catches, faces, somber and distant, of family members from long ago. A flat-screen television was mounted, incongruously, on the wall to their left, above a small smoked-glass entertainment center. To the right of where Tom and Matheson were sitting, one room over, from the kitchen, came the sound of a radio. At first Tom thought it was a talk show. Then he realized that Shellberg, even off-duty, likely out of habit, was monitoring the local police band.

For more than an hour, then, over porcelain cups of transcendentally strong coffee muted with cream, Shellberg told them of his family, how they came to settle in Macready's Point following the war, their ties to the ocean both before and after.

"It was my uncle Kurt who went missing," Shellberg said. "He was an engineer on a U-boat. For my father, he was something of an obsession. Rumor said, first, that his boat had been sunk off the Grand Banks late in 1942; intensive research— and access to data declassified after the war— as much as confirmed the fact. My father— odd thing— he was terrified of the water. He never even learned to swim. But Kurt was his only brother, and practically all the family my father had, and Vati felt nearer to him, living here." Shellberg unbent his long legs, rose from the chair in which he'd been sitting, opposite Tom and Matheson. He went to the kitchen, returned with the coffee pot, refreshed their cups. "Do you want to know the strangest thing, at least to my father's way of thinking...?"

"What's that, Dan?" Matheson asked.

"Uncle Kurt's U-boat: neither the Americans nor the Canadians nor the British ever took credit for the kill."

The windows were open; the air had been cooling since Matheson and Tom arrived at Shellberg's house. Now Tom could smell the faintest trace of ozone, could feel a lowering of pressure through his breastbone. He asked Shellberg, as thunder rumbled through the frame of the house:

"Is there any connection between your uncle and Devil's Island, Dan?"

"Ahh—"

Another boulder-roll of thunder, followed, this time, by a heavy pattering of raindrops. Shellberg checked the windows in the room, made partial closings, re-seated himself. "November 1942," he said. "Black November. Terrible seas. Thunder during snowstorms. During ice storms. There was a light-keeper on Crow Island who vanished. Likely swept into the ocean and drowned—"

Tom interrupted: "Miss Cassidy didn't mention that."

"She probably doesn't know, Tom," Matheson said. "Hardly a prime selling point for those advertising the job, is it?"

"— and then," Dan Shellberg continued, his gray-blue eyes intent behind their benevolence, "there was the matter of the ship— the cargo vessel— that may or may not have sunk in one of those storms. Not far— or so my father's rumors said— from your Devil's Island, Doctor Buckley."

Tom, his coffee cup gripped tightly between his hands, found himself as much as staring at the older man.

_I have to get out there,_ he thought.

#####

#####

As the rain built from a shower to the night's predicted storm, they met at the Happer Institute, and there they took to a small conference room one floor above the lower-level labs. "They" were Stephen Costas and Randy Crosley and Dane Hollister, avoiding public places such as the Anchor Cafe or The Shallows, avoiding further still the gossiping questions that might arise were someone to see them leaving Costas's quarters at the institute or, worse, Hollister's office or house in town, Hollister being, after all, the husband of the chief of police.

They were at the institute for one further reason: Crosley was angry and shaken. He wanted, Hollister knew, to see his cohorts' faces, to look them in the eye and to see if they had the guts to look back. Hollister didn't fear the man, not exactly— he himself stood six feet tall, and he'd kept himself in decent shape. But, at forty-six, his body remembered with sore caution the hits he'd taken on the football field in high school and college, and he had no desire to be hit in the here-and-now by someone packing Crosley's bulk, muscle, and aggression. He hung back as Costas, arrogantly blithe as ever, entered the conference room first, followed by Crosley; he waited until Crosley had seated himself before he closed the door and picked for himself a chair that kept the bulk of the room's white-topped table between himself and the wrecker.

Crosley, for the moment, focused his unshaven dark anger on Costas. His eyes were bloodshot from salt water and decompression. "You never said anything about sea monsters, you fucking son of a bitch."

Shock registered itself in the stillness of Costas's expression. He pushed back slightly in his chair, away, on his side of the table, from Crosley; the fingers of his right hand were splayed at the table's edge, as though in a calm laying-on or, barring that, a request for reason.

"What colors were you and Everhart wearing?" he asked Crosley.

Now Hollister was scowling and shocked. It wasn't the reply he had been expecting. He looked from Crosley to Costas. "Sea monsters? What is he talking about—?"

Costas's right hand gestured Hollister silent. "Dane, if you please—"

"What fucking sea monsters?"

"I'll explain." Costas turned to Hollister with deepwater eyes, dangerous, lightless, and cold. "One thing at a time, if you please." He looked back to Crosley and repeated: "What colors were you and Everhart wearing, Randy?"

"Gray wetsuits."

"And your tanks?"

"Green for Everhart, yellow ones for me—"

"Christ, you're lucky it didn't take you, too," Costas exclaimed. "What did I tell you about colors to avoid...?"

Crosley glared at him. "You don't work down there, Doc. We need high-viz colors to—"

"— to get yourself marked as targets and torn apart. It's bad enough trying to control those things with the water warming and the blooms increasing. I don't need you and your yahoos packaging yourself as snacks in the bargain—"

Hollister interrupted: "Would one of you kindly tell me what the fuck is going on? _Sea monsters—_?"

He was a sometime lawyer and a more-than-sometime real-estate agent, Dane Hollister was. He was also married to Macready Point's chief of police. Three months ago, Stephen Costas had lured him into an investment proposition, a proposition that seemed fantastic, perhaps, but hardly the stuff of horror stories: if Hollister would provide a summer's worth of funding for a wreck-diving crew, Costas would share with him (and with the dive-crew, too, of course), a cache of Canadian gold that had sunk with a United States Navy Liberty ship near Devil's Island in 1942.

For a long moment, Stephen Costas, inhuman patience in his shark-black eyes, looked at Hollister without speaking. Then he peaked his fingertips and said: "I'm afraid we're not hunting for gold, Dane."

#####

#####

It was six-fifteen, and at least two of them were past not only their lunch but their dinner as well. Tom and Matheson were making last bits of small talk with Dan Shellberg on their way to the door, when Shellberg froze, listening to the sound of the radio from the kitchen.

"Pardon me," he said.

Tom had heard the dispatches without listening to them; he and Matheson eased a step or so closer to the kitchen as Shellberg went to respond to something he'd understood and his guests hadn't. Now attuned, Tom heard Fran Hollister's, nasal and crackling over the radio's speaker:

_ Did you hear that, Dan?_

Shellberg spoke into the transmitter cupped in his long fingers. "I did, Frances."

_I'm heading for the shore now. Jimmy and Ted are already down there._

"Roger that, Fran. Take care." Shellberg hung up the transmitter and turned to Tom and Matheson's inquisitive looks. "Someone found an arm in the rocks at the edge of the beach north of town," he said. To the immediate, sickened query lighting Tom's eyes, he added: "A _woman's_ arm. They're looking for the rest of her now. Chief Hollister is debating whether to issue a swimming- and small-craft-warning for the area."

#####

#####

Numb, stunned, and queasy, his brain aswim with revelations bordering somewhere between betrayal and science fiction— _Mind-control, anyone? Secret Allied experiments?—_ Dane Hollister split up with Randy Crosley and Stephen Costas and headed home. Frances wasn't there: she'd been called away to the shore. He heard it all over the police-band radio. Seemed one of the locals had found a clam bucket... and a human arm. A woman's arm. Handy, that radio, for keeping track of goings-on around town.

Frances didn't call to let him know she'd be running late. She didn't need to.

She would have known that her husband had been listening. Both she and Dane had long ago accepted the fact that he was— in her words (and casting no aspersions toward his mother, with whom she actually got along)— a sneaky son of a bitch.

What she didn't know was that he was semi-directly responsible for a wave of terror rising from the ocean floor less than ten miles offshore.

#####

#####

Between his grief-based semi-insomnia the night before, the fresh air and windy sunlight that he'd absorbed today, and the good dinner weighting his belly (he and Matheson had accepted Nancy Patterson's standing offer of chowder, which, along with crusty fresh-baked bread and a chilled bottle of white wine, had been exactly as delicious as Nancy had promised), Tom Buckley would sleep well tonight. He was nearly under, in fact— he had to make what felt like a profound physical effort to re-open his eyelids— when one petty thought niggled its way into his dream-ready head: he'd forgotten to charge his phone. Two minutes later, having retrieved said phone from his jeans pocket and having found, moreover, an open socket behind his nightstand, he realized, on the cusp of plugging in the charger, that his Nokia had been turned off all day.

In boxers and a t-shirt, Tom sat on the edge of the bed and checked his messages. There was one, one only, from Doctor Sazerac, with a time-stamp of six-forty-eight p.m. Tom felt himself brace inwardly; in the quiet of his room, with the rain lashing through the pointed firs outside his window, he listened:

_Doctor Buckley: hello. This is Emil Sazerac. I have preliminary findings concerning your brother's demise. It seems I was mistaken, Doctor Buckley: Robert did not suffer a collision with a tanker. At present, we're classifying his death as drowning incident to animal misadventure. That is to say, it appears he was attacked by a creature as yet unknown. As for the substance on his skin... it isn't crude oil, as you've likely guessed. The laboratory in Portland should have an analysis for us by sometime tomorrow. My apologies, Doctor Buckley, for the non-finality of these findings; again, my condolences for your loss. Please contact me at your earliest convenience to acknowledge receipt of this message. Good bye._

Tom shut off his phone, set it on the nightstand. He got back under the covers and lay on his back, staring up at the angle in the ceiling.

_... a creature as yet unknown._

He wouldn't sleep now. He couldn't. He turned his face toward the glow of the bedside lamp, wondering if he might venture downstairs to borrow a book from the library in the living area— _Love in the Time of Cholera_: he'd started it years ago and never finished it, and there was a paperback copy on the far right side of the fourth shelf down— when the words came to his mind, in his own voice, as clearly as if he'd spoken them aloud:

_I'm in the light._

Tom closed his eyes- just for a second, he thought; after that, within seconds, he was sound asleep.

#####

#####

#####


	7. Chapter Four: Mahoney and the Walfords

**A/N:** Just when you thought (or were wishing, hoping, and praying) that this thing had been seduced and abandoned...! Turns out, life kind of got away from me over the last few weeks; turns, out, too, that this chapter turned into a regular monster. (Which is not to be confused with what might— or might not— be happening just a little ways down the pike.) Short form: I split the thing in two. Here's Chapter Four... and— be advised!— Chapter Five is right around the proverbial corner. Read on, stay tuned, and, as always, thanks for showing up...!

#####

#####

**Chapter Four: Mahoney and the Walfords**

When Frances Hollister got home, it was after midnight. She parked her cruiser on the driveway next to Dane's powder-silver Escalade. The thing had always looked to her like what God might drive if He were a pimp, but the money was Dane's, it had come solely from his business, and he was approaching that age when men started thinking of big, powerful toys. Kept him from buying some damned speedboat, at any rate, at least for the time being.

It was still raining. The grass between the house and the drive was criss-crossed with rivulets. On the porch, Frances shook the water off of her mac before going inside. Took her sand-mudded work-shoes off, too.

She'd seen the light from the living room when she pulled in the drive; now, hanging up her hat and stepping inside in her thick damp socks, she heard the television.

"Dane—?" she called, so he'd know it was her coming in. Or so he'd have less of an excuse if he took a shot at her with the Glock he'd gotten himself— on Frances's advice— after he'd taken a firearms safety course. The way Frances figured it, no way could a fellow of Dane's ego live knowing his wife had a gun and he didn't.

He was on the sofa in gray lounge pants and a blue t-shirt, sitting, not lying, and he looked like he was watching a show, all forty-eight-diagonal black-and-white high-definition inches of it, on World War II naval action in the North Atlantic. The History Channel. He was awake; she saw him blink. He might've been a thousand miles away.

"Hiya, Dane...?" Frances said again.

"Hi, Fran." Dane turned his head and looked at her. "How'd it go?"

Frances knew he monitored the police band. He would have known about the arm found on the beach. "Still haven't found the rest of her," she said. "Getting rough on the water, and it's blowing like hell. We'll pick up again tomorrow morning."

"That's too bad," Dane said.

Hearing the neutrality in his tone, looking at him, something shifted in the pit of Frances's stomach. Something off about him. It took her a second to think what it was. Then she realized she'd never seen him look so small. So unsure. Not even after that time he'd come crawling back, all contrite, following that realtor's convention in Minneapolis. Him poking a condo-shifter from Coral Gables Frances could forgive, as long as he didn't bring the clap home with him. Not worth the bother, gossip, and expense of a divorce, one or two slip-ups, not after all these years.

"Got something bothering you, Dane?" she asked, gently.

"No, Frannie. Just wanted to see you got home okay."

He'd always been a crappy liar. This time, though, she didn't point it out to him. Not with her being tired, cold, and rained on. And not with him looking like a lab puppy that knew it'd just eaten one of your best work boots.

She leaned over the sofa and kissed his temple. He smelled of Old Spice body wash, Head and Shoulders shampoo, just a hint of sweat. "I'm going to bed. Don't stay up all night, you hear?"

Dane nodded, not looking at her, not saying anything more. She saw his Adam's apple bob in a swallow.

A dead man missing an arm. An arm missing what was, more likely than not, a dead woman. Too much mystery for Macready's Point. She'd think clearer in the morning. Frances Hollister went upstairs, took a hot shower, and went to bed.

#####

#####

Robert Buckley was sitting, shirtless, at the foot of Tom Buckley's bed. He'd been cut open from top to bottom and stitched back together again. _The autopsy,_ Tom's brain reminded him. _That was yesterday_. With his remaining hand, Robert was fingering the stitches just below his sternum; his bearded pale face bore a placidly bemused smile. "Funny," he said. "They don't even itch."

Mortified, Tom stared. He mouthed his dead brother's name, but no sound came out.

Robert seemed to hear anyway. He looked at Tom with distant patience clouding the blue of his eyes. "Tell her it doesn't hurt any more, Tom. Tell her I'm okay. Would you do that for me?"

A sharp, strident piping from Tom's alarm clock. Startled, he looked to the nightstand. When he looked back at the end of the bed, Robert was gone.

#####

#####

Tim Mahoney had no stomach for breakfast. Following the incident with Joe Everhart yesterday, the Crosley Dives team was taking a day off. They were seconds away, Mahoney knew, from scrubbing the expedition altogether: big Bill Esterhazy wasn't a coward, but he'd said he couldn't shake the sight of the blood coming off Everhart as he thrashed on the deck of the dive boat; he was heading back to Boston. That left Mahoney, Crosley, Jerry Cooper, and Jeff Stanovich. Jerry and Jeff had gone in to town, in search of bacon and eggs. Mahoney was in Crosley's room, ostensibly to talk strategy over plastic cups of bitter instant coffee. But Mahoney was more in the mood for answers. He hadn't slept all that well: not only was he worried for Everhart, who'd been his friend for the better part of a decade, but he, too, kept replaying the sight of Joe laid out screaming in a stew of seawater and blood. Something wrong, terribly wrong, with what had happened— not that decompression sickness was ever, under any circumstances, _right—_ and he had an unshakeable feeling that Crosley hadn't been completely honest about what had happened.

So there he was, trying to fix words to his suspicions, sitting at the round pressed-wood table in the room Crosley shared with Stanovich, awkwardly turning a brown plastic cup holder between his hands while steam smelling like burned motor oil wafted off his coffee. Crosley drank from his own cup, wincing at the heat or the taste or both, or at the headache he still likely had, coldwater deep dives being hell on the human body, and said nothing, not so much out of patience, it seemed, but like he was daring Mahoney to speak.

"I saw his suit," Mahoney said, at last. "We all saw his suit. That wasn't panic, Randy. Joe didn't get the terrors. Something attacked him."

"Could be."

"What do you mean: 'could be'?"

"I didn't see it, Tim. Dark as fuck down there: you know that. By the time I got clear of the hold, Joe was gone."

"What if it was the same thing that got that doctor? Buckley? What if it was...?"

"What if it was?"

"Then— hell, Randy, we ought to tell someone."

"That Joe panicked on a dive?"

"That wasn't panic. I just said that— You just said— Something attacked him."

Mahoney stopped speaking as realization jolted into his brain. He set down his coffee and stared hard at Crosley. "What the hell is going on here, Randy? This isn't some damn treasure hunt, is it? What aren't you telling us?"

"Jesus _Christ,_ Tim—"

"What the hell is going on?"

If you punched two holes in a barrel of heavy crude, that's how Crosley's eyes were. Pinpointed, dark, as dead as a couple of bullets. That same focus he used to keep his shit together on a dive: he was using it on Mahoney now. Mahoney had to fight not to look away.

"Would you listen to yourself? Fuck, it's like _you've_ got the terrors," Crosley said. "Joe rips his suit and gets the bends, and all of a sudden it's fucking _Jaws_. We're diving under incredibly dangerous circumstances: accidents are bound to happen. Joe knew that. _We_ know that." He stopped talking, stopped with the scowling. Mahoney watched the rise and fall of Crosley's beefy chest beneath his t-shirt as the man breathed. In his head, he could practically hear the long hiss-click of a regulator. He said nothing. More quietly, more reasonably, Crosley continued: "Now what I need from you is someone I can rely on to back me up while we finish this thing. One day, two, tops, and we'll either have found that gold or we won't. Two days, Tim. Can you do that for me? For the team?"

"Yeah, Randy," Mahoney said, or his voice just said it for him. "Sure."

"Good man."

Mahoney nodded. He finished his coffee, got up, headed back to his room. En route, in his front right-hand pocket, his phone vibrated. Outside the pocked metal door of his room, his other hand trolling his other pocket for the key, he answered it:

"Tim Mahoney."

_Mr. Mahoney, this is Doctor Paula Morris. I'm calling from Mercy Hospital, in Portland. We have you listed as a contact for a Mr. Joe Everhart—_

The green plastic key tag hooked on the corner of Mahoney's pocket, took the key with it as it fell to the gritty concrete walk. Mahoney asked, as he bent to pick it up: "How is he?"

_I'm sorry, Mr. Mahoney: he passed away half an hour ago. We're contacting his family now._

Mahoney straightened. He found himself staring numbly at the door to the room. "Thanks for letting me know."

He hung up. He turned to head back to Crosley's room, to break the news to Randy. Then he thought better of it. (Or worse: there'd been something in Crosley's eyes, something not in his words, that line-of-crap pep-talk. Something he wasn't saying.) Joe Everhart's silver F-250 was parked outside the room he and Mahoney had shared. Mahoney had the keys. He got in the truck, started it up, and headed for town.

He was going to the police.

#####

#####

If he just tucked in, if he just filled his coffee cup and his plate and sat down and started eating, Margaret wouldn't ask him how he'd slept. That was Tom Buckley's line of reasoning. Matheson was already at the kitchen table, sipping coffee from a white mug while she read what had to be a local paper. A crumb-littered plate was pushed off to the side, near her right elbow, on the wooden tabletop. Nancy Patterson was nowhere in sight. Tom piled a plate with scrambled eggs from a warming dish on the counter, and with chunks of melon from a stoneware bowl set in a bigger bowl filled with ice. He poured himself a cup of coffee, took an English muffin from the ubiquitous basket of baked goods on the table, and sat down.

"Morning, Margaret."

"Good morning, Tom." Matheson folded her paper, looked at him. Tom was right: he practically saw her inquiry reformulate itself as she noticed his plate. "So what's our plan of attack?"

Tom replied, around his first mouthful of eggs: "Get out to Devil's Island, have a look around."

"We're probably going to need a diver."

"Dick Tulley can find us a diver." Tom's thoughts, as he tore a chunk off his muffin, turned, that suddenly, to seawater and darkness and cold. To Robert, sitting, pale and dead, on the comforter at the foot of his bed. He felt the corners of his mouth quiver as he tried a smile. "You've got him wrapped around your little finger, Margaret."

"I'd prefer to ask at the institute, Tom," Matheson replied, coolly, "if you don't mind." She was frowning slightly as she looked at him, as if she wanted to add something but was unsure how, tactfully, to phrase it.

"What is it, Margaret?" Tom asked.

Matheson shook her head. The frown left her face, but her dark eyes were sad. "Nothing, Tom—"

From the pocket of her cardigan came a soft trilling. Matheson fished out her phone, answered it. "Matheson."

In the quiet that followed, while Matheson listened to her caller, Tom focused on his food. He found that he was feeding himself mechanically, as if his mind and body had lost integration, had, during the night, become strangers to one another; more disturbing yet, he found he couldn't taste what was in his mouth. He swallowed hard, reached for his coffee cup. Though he could feel the stinging heat of the liquid on his lower lip and tongue, he couldn't taste the coffee, either.

Across from him, Matheson hung up, put away her phone. "That was Chief Hollister," she said. "She's got someone at the station she says we'll want to meet. She says she has a copy of Doctor Sazerac's report on Robert, too."

#####

The morning was sticky and warm, the sun working to burn away the remainder of last night's gale. What breeze there was seemed only to nudge and shift the moppish heat. Outside the police station, the condenser of the air conditioner was already burring its complaint; inside, the place was like a cave or a mausoleum, the air cool but settled and stagnant. Dan Shellberg unfolded himself like a benevolent giant mantis from his chair at the dispatcher's desk when Tom and Matheson walked in; he said his good mornings and ushered them back to Chief Hollister's office.

"Morning." Frances Hollister met them at the door. "Margaret, Tom: I have here a Mister Tim Mahoney. Late of Crosley Dives."

Mahoney had been sitting in one of Hollister's steel-framed office chairs; when Tom and Matheson entered, he rose and turned to face them. Tom recognized one of the men who'd been waiting for him and Matheson outside The Shallows night before last. Mahoney was a big kid, maybe in his mid-twenties, shorter than his companion had been but solid through the shoulders and chest, with a broad, regular-featured face, light brown hair, eyes the color of grass at the midpoint of a midsummer draught.

"Had a dive emergency out around the ten-mile mark yesterday," Hollister said to Matheson and Tom. "Maybe you heard. It was a friend of Mr. Mahoney's that got hurt."

Matheson studied Mahoney's expression. "Was he the man who was waiting with you outside the bar the other night?"

Mahoney nodded, frowning, looking like a man who was uncomfortable but trying to be polite. "Yeah."

"How is he?"

"He died this morning. Pulmonary barotrauma and arterial embolism." Mahoney couldn't quite meet Matheson's eyes. "They— they couldn't get the gas out of his blood," he added, as if to apologize for the medical arcana he'd just heard himself quote.

"I'm sorry." Matheson laid a gentle hand on Mahoney's shoulder. She glanced at Tom, waited a tactful moment. "Why did you want to see us, Mr. Mahoney?"

"I think that—" Mahoney looked to Tom. "It was your brother, wasn't it? That marine biologist who— who—"

No need for tact. Not when Tom was so in need of answers. He nodded at Mahoney. "Who got killed: yeah."

"Whatever got him, I think it might have gotten Joe, too."

"I find your wording intriguing, Mr. Mahoney," Matheson said, seating herself in one of the chairs opposite Hollister's desk. "Your friend, Joe, was diving at a depth of— what—?"

"Just over two hundred feet."

"From what I understand of deep-water diving, that's a fatality just waiting to happen."

Mahoney turned on her, anger darkening his expression. Matheson looked at him calmly. Expectantly. Her statement, like her tone, Tom knew, was meant to elicit a response, not to provoke. He'd seen her use the same tactic a hundred times in the lecture hall.

And, like dozens of students before him, Mahoney opened up. He sat down in the chair nearest Matheson's, drew himself nearly, in a squeak of rubber floor-savers, to a confessor's distance from her. "I was on the boat, not in the water. I'd been down already that day; I had to let my blood settle. I was on deck when Randy came up—"

"Randy...?" Matheson asked.

"Randy Crosley. He's— We're his team. _Were_ his team—" Mahoney leaned forward, rested his elbows on his thighs. "He told us Joe was gone. Swept off by the current. He lied. Joe had lost the anchor line, but he made it to the top. For whatever reason, he dropped his weights and bolted for the surface." Mahoney swallowed. "He ended up with the bends. His blood would've been like cream of tomato soup. You can't imagine the pain. He was screaming; he told me wanted to die. If I had been him, I would have wanted to die, too. And he was screaming something else—"

Matheson put her hand on his arm. "What was that, Tim?"

"'Monster.' He was screaming about a monster."

Matheson's tone was patient. "Blind terror is one of the bi-products of depth narcosis, isn't it?"

"Yeah. Yeah, it is." Mahoney roughly wiped his eyes. "But this was wasn't the terrors. Something happened to him." He looked at Matheson. "His suit was slashed to ribbons. Almost like something got at him with a straight razor."

"Which," Frances Hollister quietly interrupted, "leads us nearly to Dr. Sazerac's report on Robert Buckley. And to the woman's arm we found on the beach last night." She glanced at Margaret and Tom. "You've heard about that, right—?"

"Right." Tom took a chair for himself, across from Matheson and Mahoney. "We were at Dan Shellberg's when the dispatch came through."

Hollister seated herself at her desk, slid sheets of paper from a manila folder. Tom drew his chair nearer to her desk, turned the first of the pages his way.

Tim Mahoney half-rose. "Do you want me to wait outside?"

"No, Tim. That's alright," Matheson said.

She leaned in, joined Tom in reading Sazerac's reports; a moment later, she voiced a summation for both of them: "He doesn't think it was teeth."

Hollister tipped wearily back in her chair. "And here I was, wishing we had nothing more than a shark or a killer whale on our hands."

The bone, both that of Robert's shoulder and that of the mystery woman's humerus, had been sliced through. _As if,_ the report on Robert said, Sazerac's words typed into the NOTES section on the white page, _with a very sharp blade, like an amputation saw—_

"'— or a beak.'" Tom frowned as he read aloud.

"'Beak,'" Hollister echoed. "Whatever _that_ means. Like we've got giant damn cormorants attacking folks under the water or something."

Tom, with Matheson reading beside him, paged further through the report. "They still haven't identified the substance that was on his face and clothes."

"Emil's forwarded samples to the state crime lab in Augusta and to the zoology department at the U of M in Orono."

"Mm hm." Matheson paused in her reading, turned to Mahoney. "Will your _friends—_" —and she leaned slightly, sarcastically, on the word— "— appreciate the fact that you've gone to the police, Tim?"

"Probably not."

Hollister asked, with a blend of practiced tact and pragmatism: "Will you be safe, staying at the Baraboo?"

Mahoney hunched his burly shoulders, his expression grim. "I kind of doubt it."

"Right." Hollister leaned across her desk, called out the door of her office: "Dan—?"

Dan Shellberg appeared at the door a moment later. "Yes, Frances?"

"You ever finish cleaning out that garret room?"

"Last fall, yep."

Hollister nodded toward Tim. "Got a temporary tenant for you, if you want one."

In another life, Tom thought, she would have been a master concierge. Shellberg looked at Mahoney with friendly appraisal; Mahoney straightened politely in his chair.

"Name?" Shellberg asked.

"Mahoney. Tim Mahoney."

"I'll give you directions to the house when you're done here, Tim."

Mahoney looked a little stunned. "Thank you—"

"No bother. No bother at all." Shellberg brushed the air with languid long fingers and drifted back out of the doorframe. He called, on his way back to the dispatcher's desk: "Let me know if you'll be needing anything else, Fran."

"Mm hm. Thanks, Dan." Hollister turned her attention back to her office guests. Specifically, she looked at Tom, who had much the same feeling as he'd had when Hollister had walked up alongside the Bonneville during the traffic stop three days ago. She might come across as laid-back and friendly, might, in fact, be on her way to becoming Tom's and Matheson's friend-in-fact, but Hollister had a responsibility to her community and the people in it. And, Tom thought, she carried a gun as part of her job— something that Tom, as either a physicist or a debunker of the paranormal, in either the lecture hall or the field, couldn't imagine doing.

"Tell me your plans, Tom," she said. "No that you and Margaret have got the report on Robert, now that you've heard from Tim, here: what's next?"

"We want to have a look around Devil's Island," Tom replied. He turned to Mahoney. "Tim, would that interest you?"

"Would it help to explain what happened to Joe?"

"It might."

Mahoney nodded. "Count me in."

"Wait. Wait. Hold on, here." Hollister looked from Mahoney to Tom. "_Around_ Devil's, or _on_ Devil's?"

"Both, if we could," Tom said. "Is there anything that would prevent us from doing that?"

"Aside from the fact that there's no good place to land, no."

Matheson spoke: "But you would just as soon we didn't."

"I'd be remiss in my duties if I didn't point out the safety risks."

"Are you going to stop us, Chief Hollister?" Tom asked.

"Much as I'd like to, I'm not. Got tourists doing damn fool things around here all the time. Only difference is, far as I can see, you've got a _reason_ to be doing 'em." Hollister shifted a world-weary frown from Tom to Matheson. "Just be careful out there."

#####

#####

Stephen Costas was having a less-than-optimal day. Randy Crosley had called him first thing that morning to let him know that the dive team was as good as decimated. The lab itself was in quiet chaos, as Robert Buckley's student assistants worked— with Costas's assistance, of course— to consolidate Buckley's research for shipment to the Happer Institute's main campus outside Boston. Even worse, Jessica Brand's assistant clam-handlers were underfoot: Brand had failed to show up for work, and she wasn't answering her phone.

And now, instructions to Reception notwithstanding, he had visitors. A man and a woman, both looking to be in their early thirties, both in jeans and travel-wrinkled polos, his red, hers a navy blue. He had a compact but muscular build, spike-tousled wheat-colored hair, blunt, bulldog features, blue eyes; she, her light brown hair short and curly, was waiflike but steely-looking, and she, half-facing Costas's way, locked pale gray eyes on him as he approached.

Costas extended his hand to her. "Doctor Stephen Costas. How can I help you?"

The woman shook his hand. Her own hand was small but bony and strong, her fingers calloused. "Terry Walford." She nodded toward the bullish man beside her. "This is my husband, Craig. We're looking for Robert Buckley."

Costas asked, as he shook hands with Craig Walford: "Are you friends of his family?"

"We're from the Happer Institute; we're colleagues of—" Craig stopped speaking. He scowled at Costas from under fair, heavy brows. "Has something happened to him?"

"Doctor Buckley was killed in a mishap at sea three days ago."

Almost a feeling of pleasure at the shock in their expressions. A bit of payback for this shitty day. Costas found himself suppressing a smile.

"What— what happened to him?" Terry Walford asked.

"I'm afraid the local authorities can provide more details than I can—" Costas paused, looking past the Walfords. More damned traffic from the direction of the main lobby, and a semi-speak-of-the-devil as well: the double doors had just swung back on their powered hinges to admit the overbearing Dr. Matheson and Robert Buckley's brother, Tom. "If you'll excuse me—"

He walked away. That suddenly, that quickly, that rudely. He headed for the sanctuary of his office in The Aquarium with a muttered "You asshole" from Craig Walford tossed after him. Costas ignored the insult, if for no other (and very simple) reason than Walford looked like he could tear Costas in half without even trying.

#####

Tom resigned himself to the fact that he'd have to get used to it.

"It," in this case, as he and Matheson entered the lab area of the Happer Institute campus outside Macready's Point and Matheson called after the retreating Dr. Costas (and was ignored), was another strange woman turning Tom's way, looking at Tom wide-eyed, and very nearly shrieking. Like the first woman whom Tom had appalled— that being Anne Cassidy, the day before last— she looked like the type for whom shrieking was the exception, not the rule.

"Are you— Pardon me—" There was a man with the woman, similar to her in age and compact height, thuggishly or ruggedly handsome or homely (honestly, he had the type of face that could do any or all of them simultaneously. An _interesting_ face, Matheson would probably say.). He fixed Tom with keen blue eyes. "— but are you Tom? Tom Buckley? Robert's brother?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I am."

"I'm Doctor Craig Walford." The man took and shook Tom's hand as he spoke. "Terry and I— this is my wife, Terry— we were friends of Bob— of Robert's."

Terry Walford asked, meeting Tom's eyes with what seemed like courageous effort as she shook his hand in turn: "Is he dead? Is he really dead?"

"Yes."

Tom watched tears well in her eyes. "No," Terry said. "Oh, no."

"We're sorry," Craig said. He blinked hard at what might have been, but obviously wasn't, a piece of grit or a fallen eyelash. "Robert was sort of a welcome third wheel—" His gaze tracked, almost apologetically, to Matheson. "If you know what I mean."

"I think I do." Matheson reached out and squeezed his hand. "It's good to meet you, Dr. Walford."

Terry Walford asked Tom: "What brings you here, Doctor Buckley—?"

"Tom. Please."

"Tom. Sure. Are you here because of your brother?"

Tom heard himself reply: "We were going to ask Doctor Costas if he knew where we could find a diver."

"Does your need for a diver have anything to do with what happened to Robert?" Craig Walford asked.

Matheson nodded. "It does."

Terry said: "Craig and I have done our fair share of diving, Dr. Matheson."

"Call me Margaret." Matheson glanced shrewdly toward the narrow row of offices beyond the lab. Behind the glass door of his own private cubbyhole, Costas was semi-hunched at his desk, talking on the phone. "Can Tom and I buy you and your husband lunch, Dr. Walford?"

#####

They ended up taking the Walfords for BLTs and iced tea at the Anchor Cafe, where they learned that while Craig's work focused on dolphins and other cetaceans, Terry felt more comfortable around sharks.

"Sharks operate on instinct," she said, sipping through a straw from her sweating-cool glass. "Dolphins are too intelligent. Makes them unpredictable."

"'Makes them too much like people' is what she really wants to say." Craig Walford exchanged a glance with his wife: this was a debate of long and, Tom suspected, ultimately affectionate standing. "We've got our equipment," he said, looking back at Matheson and Tom. "We'll need a boat, though."

Tom looked to Matheson; she kept him in her peripherals. "I can get us a boat," she said. "Tom and I know someone who will want to help."

#####

#####

Dick Tulley said _yes_ almost before Matheson asked: a case, Tom thought, of honest curiosity regarding Robert's fate, old-fashioned gallantry, and a middle-aged crush combining practically to mimic telepathy. Matheson told him of the Walfords and of Tim Mahoney; Tulley said he'd muster supplies and gear, if Margaret and her people would be good enough to meet him at the dock by eight-thirty a.m.

This left Tom and Matheson with the remainder of the day. It left Tom time to face a somber duty: Emil Sazerac had released Robert's body.

Armed with his brother's death certificate, tucked in a manila envelope stamped with the seal of the coroner's office of the State of Maine, Tom sat next to Matheson in the office of Rosalind Steen, the managing director of the Steen Funeral Home. Yet another recommendation on Fran Hollister's part. "Nothing fancy," she'd said, handing Tom a white business card. "They're good folks, and they've got the facilities."

_Facilities,_ Tom had mentally echoed, his chest feeling, again, suddenly hollow, as he saw the word in neat serifed black on the card: **Crematorium**.

Now, from across the polished top of an antique black-oak desk on which was spread a host of paper-based offerings, of services and funerary vessels and their attendant costs, Rosalind Steen was watching him with patient sympathy. She looked to be in her well-preserved early sixties, with a face of clean lines and small, defined features, hazel eyes, faded-gold hair swept up in a coif that might have been considered quaint in the sixties and that seemed timeless now. "We can have Robert sent to another parlor, if you prefer," she said. Her voice was soft. Professionally hushed. As if she wished not to wake someone who'd just fallen asleep in the next room.

Which, in a way, Tom found himself thinking, was almost too near the truth.

"That won't be necessary, Miss Steen," he said. "Thank you." The idea seemed oddly repellent. His brother's poor body, mutilated, autopsied, no doubt beginning to show signs of decomposition: better he— the part of him that had _been_ Robert Buckley, his identity, his essence, his soul (and for a moment, Tom found himself aching to believe in such things), whatever you wanted to call it— should be released as quickly and cleanly as possible from his physical remains.

Rosalind Steen asked: "Would you like to see him again, before...?"

"Thank you, no." Tom kept his voice steady. His hand shook as he signed the contract for cremation, the bill of costs for the facilities and urn.

#####

After the tastefully air-conditioned gloom of the funeral parlor, the late-afternoon heat seemed to sear Tom's skin. He and Matheson, the windows rolled down to spare the Bonneville's aging A/C, headed for Macready Point's main street to do some shopping. Nancy Patterson had kindly offered to do a load of laundry for them, and they'd accepted said offer; but neither Tom nor Matheson had come north with the conscious intent of taking part in an expedition to a rocky island off the Atlantic coast. In Marin's Sporting Goods, where Tom could still see traces of _W.T. Grant Co._ shaded a darker red against the faded robin's-breast of the fiberboard facade above the glass doors, he and Matheson bought khakis and sensible shirts, sports socks and waterproof windbreakers. Tom got himself a pair of light but sturdy Columbia trail shoes. That evening, on the pretense of breaking them in, he put on a t-shirt and a pair of hiking shorts and went for a run on the beach north of town, which he had noticed when he and Matheson first visited the Happer Institute campus— and where, as Tom understood it, someone had found the woman's arm the night before.

The sun had just dropped behind the hills west of town, leaving the beach to the gray-blue creep of dusk, when Tom set out. In the growing darkness, though, the hiss of surf to his right, he felt confident, unworried, even strangely exhilarated. Midway along the beach, he passed a woman standing at the water's edge, looking out to sea; he recognized Nancy Patterson's sister, Kris, and nodded in greeting. Seeing him, she simply stared. Tom, passing, felt her eyes follow him as if he were a ghost.

#####

#####

The next day, at the dock, half an hour before the sun pushed clear of the black eastern ocean, Randy Crosley waited for Tim Mahoney to show up. He'd be asking Mahoney to partner him on the day's dive to the _Patrick Murphy_: not only was Mahoney the best of Crosley's remaining divers, but it would be that much easier to kill him underwater. Crosley breathed the dank morning breeze and found himself noting how easy it was to think such thoughts, how unshocking: Tim had his suspicions, he was apt to fuck things up, and he needed to die. Simple.

A quarter-hour passed, with checks of equipment and the latest weather updates. Twenty minutes after that, with the sun minutes away from hoisting itself from the distant waves, Mahoney hadn't shown up.

"Bet he headed back to Boston," said Jeff Stanovich. He was nearly a head taller than Crosley, lean and homely, with rust-colored hair shaved close to his skull. He had his gunmetal eyes fixed back along the dock. "That thing with Joe hit him really hard."

Crosley was looking back toward land, too, no longer expecting to see the headlights of Joe Everhart's truck and swearing inside his head. He could feel the others— stumpy, balding Jerry Cooper, wiry-tough Ben Kreely and his older brother, Bill, whose boat they were on and who acted as their dive-wranglers— watching him.

_Shit_. The sun pushed its molten edge clear of the horizon. They were losing time. And there were rumblings from the National Weather Service about yet another storm that might hit midway-to-late in the day. Crosley spat into the water off the bow of the dive boat.

"Let's get going," he said.

#####

#####

Two and a half hours later, the leader of a different ocean-bound expedition was dealing with trouble at the Macready's Point docks. Dick Tulley, his height and breadth and musculature making him a natural for such maneuvers, had learned, years ago, that the best way to prevent a fight was to keep the would-be fighters separated. Once things escalated from words and staredowns into any kind of physical contact, peace went overboard, straight into the props. Three nights ago, Tulley had deployed said tactics on Tom, placing himself between young Dr. Buckley and what would likely have been a savage beating at the hands of Randy Crosley; at present, he was acting as a human wall between Tim Mahoney and Craig Walford, who, it seemed, took issue with what was either Mahoney's vocation or a very dangerous hobby.

"You're a professional wrecker, am I right?" From Walford's snarling tone and the blaze in his eyes, Tulley could only assume that being a wreck diver ranked right up there with selling national secrets to the Communists during the Cold War. "I need to know right now if we can expect any shit from you."

Mahoney was a shy kid, and maybe too polite for his own good. He kept quiet. Margaret Matheson said, reasonably: "Mr. Walford, Mr. Mahoney is here to help us. We're all here for the same—"

Walford snorted. "He's a treasure hunter and a thrill jockey. In other words, he's a greedy, risk-taking asshole. I won't have him backing me up."

"Craig," said Terry Walford, "calm down. No one said—"

"Terry and I dive as a team," Walford snapped, "or we don't dive at all."

"I don't see how this is even an issue," Tim Mahoney said. He kept his voice commendably level, but Tulley could see the muscles tightening around his jaw.

"You're overland on this trip, Tim," he said, before Walford could come back with another snotty remark. "You and Tom are going to check out the island. You okay with that?"

"Yeah. Sure."

"Craig," Tulley continued, "that leaves the waterwork for you and Terry. Are we good?"

"Good as can be." Walford kept his eyes on Mahoney; just before he boarded the _Fallen Angel,_ following Terry, he told the kid: "Stay away from our equipment."

Tom Buckley was helping Mahoney with the gear still on the dock; Tulley heard him mutter what Mahoney didn't: "For fuck's sake—"

Matheson, who, as a psychologist, was no stranger to the unreason of the average human male in defensive mode, looked after the Walfords with her brows raised, battle-worn, to the blue sky. She took Tulley aside, out of Tom's and Mahoney's hearing, and asked quietly: "Do you want me to stay behind, Dick?"

Tulley sensed she didn't make such a concession to every man she met. "How are you on the water, Margaret?" he asked in turn.

Matheson smiled, just a trace. "A long time ago, I was a rich girl from Long Island. I've done my share of sailing."

"More'n Tom, I take it."

"Probably. He's originally from Illinois."

Tulley shook his head, smiled back at her. "Then it's probably best you come along."

#####

With a towed gray two-seater Zodiac, courtesy of Tulley's cousin, Pete, bobbing in harness in the _Fallen Angel_'s wake, they had a smooth ride out to Devil's Island. The National Weather Service, via the supercomputer god Doppler, had issued portents of yet another storm for later in the day, but, for now, the morning was sunny and clear, a breeze from the east flicking foam from the deep-blue wavelets. Tom helped with the checking of gear as much as he felt capable, and then took his yesterday's place at the railing in the bow of the _Fallen Angel, _where he'd be the hell out of the way while the Walfords and Mahoney mustered the dive equipment. Tulley's course took them past Gull Island at a distance of at least two miles: Tom watched the island as they drew abreast and then left it in their wake. He wondered if they, in turn, were being watched; he found himself wondering how well Anne Cassidy had slept this last night. Tom's own slumber had been sound, black, practically bottomless. No dreams. No Robert.

Since they'd left Macready's Point, Matheson, who, with Tulley, was co-managing the expedition, had been shadowing him in and around the wheelhouse, asking questions about the _Fallen Angel_'s operations and equipage and about the waters they'd be navigating; now, just past the midpoint of their outbound journey, she left Tulley to his steering and joined Tom in the bow.

Beside him, she pushed her hair from her forehead, into the clearing reach of the wind. "I hate to be a mother hen, Tom—"

Tom looked where she was looking, at the red-gold rocky rise of the nearing island. Not a shadow in sight among Devil's sunlit crags, and yet the place had a darkness about it. "What's on your mind, Margaret?"

"Are you up for this?"

"Why are you asking?"

She turned to look at him. Again, her face bore that mild, sad frown. The frown from yesterday's breakfast. "Did you get any sleep last night?"

"I slept well, actually. Margaret, tell me what you're thinking."

"I woke up around three; I went to get a glass of water. I heard you talking to someone."

Through the warmth of that breezy morning, a chill shuddered up Tom's spine. "What was I saying?"

"'It doesn't hurt as much as you'd think.' I heard that distinctly."

Tom shook his head. "That wasn't me—"

"It sure sounded like you."

Tom tried to smile; again, as he had yesterday, he felt spasms in the corners of his mouth. Over his far shoulder, so that Matheson couldn't see his face, he glanced back at the wheelhouse. "Tulley's going to get jealous if he thinks _I'm_ the man of your dreams, Margaret."

Matheson responded with a dry chuckle. "Sure."

She took Tom's hand for just a second, squeezed it hard, released him. She stood by his side a minute or so longer. Then she left her place at the railing and went back toward the wheelhouse. Terry Walford stopped her midway; from then until they reached Devil's Island, Tom heard the two of them talking about their respective institutions, their jobs, about behavior and psychology both human and ichthyological. Just two academics enjoying a chat during a boat ride on a beautiful, sunny summer morning.

#####

#####

It was a bad dive, start to finish. First with Tim Mahoney failing to show up for his own execution, then with their running late to wreck site as a result, and now with Randy Crosley's discovery of what he realized he'd suspected, like an ugly, unreachable itch at the back of his mind, all along.

Save for the rusted, frozen violence, the corroded chaos, of a sixty-years-gone sinking, the forward hold of the _S.S. Patrick Murphy_ was empty. Whatever Stephen Costas had hired Crosley Dives to find— and Crosley cursed himself as a fucking idiot for ever having thought that that something might have been gold— Nazi, Canadian, or otherwise— it had already been offloaded when the ship was torpedoed.

He hung for a moment in the darkness, fought to keep his cool, to keep his breathing steady, his movements careful. He was dangerously far into the wreck, fifty feet or more, and it would be the turd on top of a shit sundae if he lost himself to anger and disappointment. Later, he'd knock the fuck out of Costas; for now, he had to focus on re-tracing his way out of the hold, past a hundred potential snags, through claustrophobically tight squeezes, without kicking up silt enough to blind himself.

He cleared the hold and stopped.

Jeff Stanovich, who'd been acting as Crosley's backup, was gone. Vanished. Crosley hauled the man's safety line in from the dark water surrounding the wreck and found a frayed end, nothing more.

Nothing more than reality: Crosley had neither the air nor the resources to risk a search. And, if he found Stanovich, chances were more than good that the man was already beyond help. At this depth, the truth was simple and awful: a second's equipment failure, a moment of panic, marked the line between life and death.

There was a third possibility at play here, too, and one worse than narcosis or mechanical breakdowns. Crosley, feeling his heartrate rise as his breathing shallowed, shone his dive lamp out into the blackness of the water beyond the frayed end of the rope, the rusted railing of the _S.S. Patrick Murphy,_ and thought he saw, at the outer edge of the lamp's glow...

... _movement_.

A moment's tingling, frozen terror. _Christ_. Crosley stared beyond the light at what he couldn't quite see. _Jesus Christ—_

He shook his head, hard. Forced the mounting panic from his mind. Fighting the strong bottom-current and his own animal fear, Crosley headed for the anchor line leading up to the dive boat and the surface.

The line had drifted. Crosley found it, the light from his lamp catching the high-viz markers in the near-blackness, yards from where he thought he and Stanovich had left it. Which meant, in turn, that the boat, for whatever reason, was no longer holding position.

Crosley, holding on to the line, checked his chronometer. Another jolt of panic: either in taking too long to work his way clear of the wreck, in speculating about Stanovich, in imagining monsters in the dark, or in searching for the anchor line, he'd lost time. He'd lost air.

In brief, he'd lost his chance at making a safe run for the surface. One last, awful truth: he'd have to cut short his stops heading up.

He was going to end up with the bends. A final bleat from the mammalian terror crowding the edges of Crosley's mind, one final thought: Maybe it would be for the best if the _thing—_ whatever it was— got him right now.

_No_. He had to keep himself alive, if only to gut Costas and that idiot, Hollister. Steadying his breathing, ignoring the heartbeat pounding in his ears, Crosley began his ascent.

#####

#####

Tulley, damn him, had made it sound easy:_ You boys head back around the south side. Looked like there might be a few tie-up points there. Work your way up and north, and the Walfords will work the caves from the north on back._

So Tom and Mahoney crept in the Zodiac, its motor nearly at an idle, along the island's south granite face, looking for a spot not only to tie off but to climb up. The sun was strong on their head and shoulders; the wind was low but gusty, the water slapping but not smashing at the rocks, and Tom thought Tulley insane. The drop from the top of the island was, at a minimum, a sheer twenty feet. Tom was on the point of suggesting they give up, or try around to the west, when Mahoney spotted something in the shadows of a fissure about six feet above water level.

"Look. There." He pointed.

Tom looked, waited for a moment as his eyes adjusted from the sparkle of the sun on the water to the sheltered dimness of the fissure. Then he saw it, mounted in the rock: a rusted metal ring about a foot in diameter.

"I see it," he said.

"That's a docking ring."

As Mahoney kept the Zodiac steady, Tom looked below the ring, to the sides. "So where's the dock?"

"See the rust stains? The breaks in the rock?"

At roughly two-foot vertical intervals, Tom saw them: reddish-brown holes, corrosion stains below, leading from the water up to the top of the cliff. Rough, corresponding splits in the stone along the way.

"Looks like someone had a ladder here, and they broke it out," Mahoney said.

"Some time ago," Tom added.

"Still could be enough for hand-grips, some kind of footing. We can climb it."

_Fuck_, Tom thought. _This is crazy. The whole thing is crazy._ But he couldn't shake the feeling that he had to see this place, really _see_ it—

And what was the worst that could happen? He could fall in the ocean. Hell, he knew how to swim.

"Okay," he said. "Let's do it."

#####

They tied off the Zodiac; they steadied the boat as best they could in the rise-and-fall surge of the water against the island; they climbed. Tom, to his credit, scrambled up the rocks, away from the see-sawing draw of the waves, with the grace of a mountain sheep. He'd always been light and sure on his feet. Mahoney, a bit more mundane, earthbound, or drawn, by professional or personal inclination, to the water, slipped on a tractionless patch at the top of the climb, bunged his right knee, and nearly managed to fall backwards onto the Zodiac before Tom got a grip on him.

The surface of Devil's Island was largely the wasteland Tom had expected. What soil there was was the result of the roots of saw-grass and dune-grass prying into the island's stone top. Over the years, the grass had grown tall, toppled, and packed down. A springy matted layer of it lay underfoot. There were no trees, but there was wood, trunks and branches, rotted spars, no doubt tossed up by storms. Tom shuddered, thinking of the height and force of the waves that could top the island: he was standing at least twenty-five feet above the water. Flocks of rooks, cormorants, and gulls, many settled in nesting clutches among the rocks, looked over, indifferent and unafraid, as he and Mahoney surveyed their surroundings.

The island was larger from the top than it had seemed from the water. The trekable surface before them was roughly the size of a football field.

"Zig-zag pattern, and we work our way north?" Mahoney suggested.

"Sounds good to me." Tom set off, to the right. Mahoney followed.

#####

#####

To the north, below the island's cliffs, the Walfords were the first to make a finding.

A cave, large, clear-watered, with good headroom— in other words, one that would have been beloved of kayakers venturing out to the island: Craig and Terry checked to the sides of its entrance, below the surface. A hunch on Craig's part: whatever they might be hoping to find, it required space as well as secrecy. A grotto, possibly, not immediately or naturally accessible from the ocean, but near enough.

His conjecture paid off. Thirty feet east of the opening of the larger of the sea caves on the island's north side, roughly twenty feet below the surface, he and Terry discovered it: the mouth of an access tunnel about five feet square, cut into the rock. The rusted stumps of steel bars were embedded in the opening, top and bottom. Craig pointed at them, drawing them to Terry's attention if she hadn't seen them already; he met her eyes through the glass of their masks and shrugged. _I don't like this, Terry. What do you think...?_

In response, Terry gestured into the tunnel. _Forward_. As ever and always. She was, after all, the woman who trusted sharks more than she trusted dolphins. Or, for that matter, most people. She angled her dive lamp ahead and swam into the tunnel. Mindful of the tight space, the limited clearance afforded his air tank, Craig followed.

#####

#####

The things they carried. Or the things, among others, that Mahoney was currently carrying, in the rucksack Tulley had mustered for them: flashlights, a bright yellow Motorola two-way radio handset (supposedly waterproof), water itself ("No use getting dehydrated," Matheson had said to Tom, without a trace of irony in her tone. "It can cloud your thinking."), a folding field-shovel, a Leatherman multi-tool, energy bars, a rudimentary first-aid kit, and rope.

Rope. For some reason, that's what struck Tom as odd. Maybe it was the sunshine heating the crown of his dark-haired head head. Maybe it was the fact that he was feeling compelled to pace long Zs across a lump of rock eight miles off the coast of Maine in search of whatever it was that had killed his brother.

"I don't understand why we need the rope," he said. "Other than the way up off the water, there's nothing to climb."

"You can always use a good length of rope," Mahoney replied. "You just never know."

_Sure,_ Tom thought. Then, a second later, he was thinking: _You're right._

That was when he was falling through the ground.

#####

#####

#####


	8. Chapter Five: The Devils

**A/N:** Another chapter gets out of hand. _Well_ out of hand. This one is, you might say, a regular... _monster_. (Or this: _And thus begins a completely right-out-of-the-blue tribute to Roger Corman._ Oh, yeah. Oh, dear.) Thanks for reading, thanks even more for your patience, and thanks most of all for any and all comments. I'm a beast when it comes to replying, but I do appreciate those kind words. Carry on, folks...!

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**Chapter Five: The Devils**

Tom dropped with a surprised shout, in a crumbling downrush of grass-tufts and dirt, to the sound, right and left, of a muffled metallic _clang_. As his simian forebears would have done millennia ago, he threw out his arms as he fell. His right wrist struck something hard, struck another something; the third something Tom managed to grab. He stopped falling; he jerked to a halt. A stinging jolt of pain radiated off his right shoulder, and he hung there, gasping, in a shower of dirt and choking dark air.

"Tom—?" Mahoney was bellowing from above. The sound of it in the darkness was like boulders dropping on Tom's head. "Tom, are you there—?"

"Yes— yes: damn it, Tim, stop shouting!" From the feel of his rotator cuff, Tom knew he'd come close to dislocating his shoulder; other than that, he wasn't hurt. "I'm okay; I'm okay—!"

Mahoney shone one of the flashlights down the shaft. Tom looked up as the beam of light caught his head and shoulders. He'd fallen about twelve feet into a shaft, approximately seven feet square, cut into the island's rocky top. Nine feet above his head, swung down against the shaft's rough sides, were two rusted steel panels. From the warping at their edges, the panels had likely originally opened up and outward, onto the island's surface; now, after years of salt-air corrosion, rainfall, and subsidence, they'd collapsed below Tom like the halves of a trap door.

"That's a ladder," Mahoney said, illuminating the wall from Tom to the surface.

Tom found himself in no mood to be snide. No _No shit_. Not now. "Thank God," he said, half to Mahoney, half to the iron rung bruising the inside of his right arm. He looked below himself, saw nothing but blackness. "How far down does it go, do you figure—?"

Mahoney, now on his belly at the surface opening, aimed the flashlight toward the bottom of the shaft. "Looks like another fifteen, twenty feet past where you are." He paused, frowning, and added: "There's water down there."

The next, obvious question— besides _What the hell am I doing here?—_ was _How deep is it?_ Tom started to climb down.

"Tom— wait—" Mahoney called. "Hold on."

He got up, straightened away from the opening. He got the rope from the rucksack, passed one end of it around his waist, dropped the other end down to Tom. Tom wrapped it around his right forearm, continued his descent. The ladder was surprisingly solid. One rung about ten feet from the bottom displayed a stomach-lurching degree of give, but, all in all, Tom made his way down without incident.

Then, standing on what looked to be the bottom rung, he paused. He held tight to the ladder and, with the timidity of a man testing the heat of a bath or the potential chill of an unfamiliar swimming pool, dipped the toe of his right hiking shoe into the black water.

It was no more than two inches deep.

Tom released the breath he'd been holding. Cautiously, he lowered his weight onto his right foot, felt through his shoe-sole a stone or concrete floor beneath a layer of slime. He stepped completely off the ladder. Already his eyes were adjusting to the darkness; with the help of Mahoney's flashlight beam and the sunshine streaming down through the dusty shaft, he could see a ways around him.

It was a room, a manmade cavern, extending farther than he could see. A ceiling of at least ten feet, plain concrete walls black with slime. No markings, no signs. Overhead, the first of a procession of light bulbs cased in rusting cages, strung one to another with insulated wire now sagging from the ceiling like Spanish moss.

And then, suddenly, too, as Tom took the first real breath he'd taken since starting his descent, putrid, encompassing, and horrible, a _smell—_

Tom covered his nose and mouth, half-gagging. "_Shit—_!"

Mahoney called down: "What is it?"

"It smells like— fucking hell— it smells like something died down here."

"Can we handle it?"

Tom coughed, spat some of the stink out of his mouth. The odor grew slightly less awful as he adjusted to it. "Yeah, I think so."

"I'm coming down."

Somewhere up above, Mahoney tied off his end of the rope. In climbing down the rusted ladder, he shook loose more debris. Tom stepped nearer the shaft's far wall; clumps of dirt splashed into the murky water around his feet. He glanced up the shaft, monitoring Mahoney's progress. The dusty square of sunlight that marked the surface of the island seemed very far away.

Mahoney, descending, brought with him the rucksack of gear that Tulley had provided them. He handed Tom a flashlight, dug out another for himself.

Tom switched on, swept his light in a slow arc out and away from the shaft.

Beside him, Mahoney coughed out not only a dual lungful of putrescent air but an incredulous "What the hell...?"

They stood at what looked to be the southern terminus of some sort of storage facility. The space, with a ceiling clearance of twelve feet or better, was huge: the beam from Tom's flashlight reached into the darkness without even brushing a far wall. Around them, rusting in the water and against what pieces of wall they could see, patched with black mildew, were steel racks, shelving, long workbenches jumbled with equipment.

Tom looked about in semi-sickened wonder. "It's some sort of laboratory," he said.

#####

#####

Fifty feet or better. That's how long the tunnel bored into the north face of Devil's Island turned out to be. Far too long for Craig Walford's liking. He wasn't prone to claustrophobia, but venturing this far into a tight space underwater was idiocy, an invitation to disaster usually reserved for cave divers or wreckers like that Mahoney kid. Walford swam steadily but cautiously, being careful not to drift up and scrape his tanks on the ceiling; he touched the right-side wall, the smoothness of the gray rock glowing in the light from his dive-lamp, and wondered:

_Who built this...?_

Ahead of him, Terry looked over her shoulder, then gestured forward and up. They'd reached the tunnel's end. Craig Walford followed his wife through another opened stumped, top and bottom, with the corroded ends of metal bars; he made a shallow ascent and surfaced beside Terry in a natural grotto. In what was otherwise pitch blackness, Craig shone his dive-lamp upward: they had at least ten feet of headroom from the water to the stone ceiling. Terry was looking, and swimming, ahead, following the beam of her own lamp.

"Craig," she said. Her voice both echoed in the wet space and was muffled, too. Less than twenty feet away, Craig could see what she no doubt wanted him to see: an edge to the pool in which they had surfaced. He saw, as he swam closer, black fifty-gallon barrels rusting near the water's edge. To the right, he could see rusting metal scaffolding, what looked like lab equipment, the dull reflection of dirty glass.

"There are stairs here," Terry announced. She emerged from the water, and Craig followed, both of them moving cautiously: cut from the rock, the steps underfoot were thick with slime. Repulsive enough, that.

More repulsive still: "Christ," Craig said, stifling a cough as he stepped clear of the water. "What's that smell?"

Beside him, in reply, Terry shuddered. Craig saw it in the shake of the beam from her lamp as the light shone forward.

Bones. The cavern in which the Walfords found themselves was some thirty feet across, and, in addition to the wrecked equipment, bones were scattered everywhere. Animal, fish, and—

"— human," Terry said quietly, as her light tracked the length of a femur.

Craig shone the beam from his own lantern around the cavern. In the wall farthest from the water, he could see, through the darkness and the corroded scaffolding, what looked like an opening, a wide passageway. He took a step toward it, to get a better look, and the edge of his right flipper caught on something on the floor.

Craig pointed his lamp downward. On the damp stone at his feet lay a regulator, a harness, and a dented air tank. Something was hand-painted in white, lengthwise, on the side of the tank tipped toward the floor; Craig reached down, turned the tank over, frowned as he read

_R. Buckley_

"Looks like he banged it coming in here," Craig said, gesturing at the gouges in the gray metal.

"_Why_ was he in here?" Terry asked. "That's what I'd like to know."

"Maybe he lost a collection trap," Craig replied, moving toward the wrecked equipment. "Maybe he found the opening, and curiosity got the better of—"

He stopped. In the light from his dive lamp, lying bleached-white among the bones piled along the wall to his left, he saw the humerus and scapula not of a human being but of a killer whale.

The end of the humerus looked as if it had been sheared through.

Terry was at his side. The beam from her lamp joined Craig's. She and Craig had been married for eleven years. Likely less as the result of anything supernatural— mind-reading, mutual gifts of telepathy, the co-joining of sympathetic souls— than of common interests, mutual hobbies, and a longstanding, intimate friendship, they sometimes joked that they shared a brain. Now Terry voiced what they both were thinking:

"It's a feeding ground."

Coupled with the implication, the rotting smell was becoming nauseating. Craig coughed, barely in lieu of retching, and asked: "A feeding ground for _what_...?"

Something large, powerful, and ruthless enough not only to kill but to _butcher_ a killer whale. Something with intelligence enough to seek out a lair, to conceal its activities.

_Something_, Craig thought, _that could be here right now._

From far back in the cave, then, to his and Terry's left, he heard it: a chittering sound, a clicking as of claws on stone. Terry heard it, too: she turned as Craig turned, shone her dive-lamp into the shadows that filled the opening at the back of the cavern.

The sound was getting nearer. "Craig—" Terry said. Her tone bespoke apprehension, not fear, a desire to leave but a desire nonetheless unsullied by panic. She was, after all, a woman who worked with sharks and their kin.

Craig, on the other hand, was wont to keep company with whales and dolphins. He was more apt to err on the side of wonder.

Of curiosity, too, however unwise. He hesitated, peering into the darkness. "Wait, Terry," he said, holding out a hand as if for quiet. "Let's see what we're dealing wi—"

He stopped speaking.

Moving close to the floor, something emerged from the cavern and surged, glistening-black, in a roiling of chitinous legs, segmented bodies, and claws, into the light of the lamps...

#####

#####

Randy Crosley reached the surface sooner than he should have. A fact that, paradoxically, likely saved his life while placing him that much closer to death.

He knew, before his head broke the glassy elastic sheen separating water and air, that he had the bends. A full twenty-three minutes sheared from his ascent, and beneath the neoprene of his suit his skin was itching; beneath his skin, his muscles were tingling; deeper still, a burning pain was beginning to radiate from his guts and heart and lungs. He pulled away his regulator and coughed out a mouthful of bloody phlegm, and only just managed to hold his breath as a wave broke over his head.

Then: panic. The first of it. When the dive began, the weather had been calm. Now the wind was rising, and the waves were trying to fold him under, and the boat, the fucking boat was _gone—_

His heart was like a thing with claws trying to thrash free of his chest. His blood had been replaced with acid. He couldn't catch more than half a breath, and he was choking on water as well as air.

And it— it-whatever-the-hell-it-was— the thing just beyond the reach of his light— it was below him, rising, he knew, _right below him—_

"Fuck—!" Crosley barked the word with force enough to empty his lungs, to tear at the lining of his throat. "_Fuck—_!"

It calmed him. Or removed him from himself enough that he could exist for a moment beyond pain and panic and assess his situation rationally.

He saw, first, that the boat hadn't gone. (This _first_ eclipsed a horrible _second_: no monster had followed him to the surface. _There was no monster_. Nothing was pulling him down save leaden fatigue and the grasp of cold water.) It was riding the waves less than a hundred yards to the northeast. Crosley swam for it, not wasting air on another shout. Odd that it hadn't held position: through the hood of his suit and the blood-rush pounding of his pulse in his ears, he couldn't hear the engines. They would see him, though; they'd spot him in the water; they'd idle over and meet him halfway for a pickup—

Only there was no one on deck. No one Crosley could see.

The panic was returning as he reached the boat. It spiked when he found that his fingers were almost too numb to grasp the rungs of the side ladder.

And it nearly knocked him out when his head cleared the railing and he saw the deck.

Blood. Blood everywhere. Other than that: nothing. No one. No movement. No bodies.

Crosley pulled himself on board, stood in a slippage of vertigo and gore on the wave-rolled deck. He felt as if he'd come upon something unawares, a stillness that could at any moment not so much mobilize and attack as fold him within itself, swallow him alive, erase him.

He pulled off his hood and his flippers and dropped his gear. The pain in his torso constricted like a fist, and he doubled over, coughing bloody, frothy sputum onto the bloody deck. He forced himself to straighten; he forced himself to breathe.

He checked the boat.

He was alone. No one above, no one below. The Kreely brothers and Jerry Cooper were gone. In the cramped galley-slant-meeting area, the storage locker, the engine compartment, Crosley found nothing, heard only the soft _punk-whump, punk-whump, punk-whump_ of the water against the hull.

He made his way back up top. He was moving more and more slowly. He could feel himself sweating inside his wetsuit: the pain was encompassing now, a biorhythm of jarring cramps and knifelike, full-body tingling. Black spots like oilslicks crowded the edges of his vision.

He needed help. He needed medical attention.

Crosley coughed again, violently. The rising wind slapped blood and ropy phlegm back into his face. He power-winched the anchor, got the engines started. He was in the wheelhouse, reaching for the radio transmitter— he was about to get underway, but he had no idea how long he'd be able to stay on his feet, and the Coast Guard, the Macready's Point shore patrol, _someone_ needed to know where he was— when a voice behind him whispered

_No_

Crosley cringed as if the word were a blow, or a warning in advance of a blow, a fatal, crushing shot to his neck or skull. Seconds passed— itching fire in his joints and, oh Christ, if he could only catch his breath— and he turned.

No one was there. Nothing was there. Neither human nor

_— monster_.

Crosley's vision was going black. So were his thoughts. Or- no: his thoughts were focusing. His mind filled with clarity, shifting, suspicious. Then absolute.

_Steve Costas._ He knew where Crosley and his team would be diving. He would be monitoring the radio transmissions from the dive boat.

He knew about the monster.

The monster that had killed Cooper and the Kreelys. The monster that had dragged Jeff Stanovich into the blackness two hundred feet below the deck on which Crosley now stood. The monster that had mauled Joe Everhart.

Costas knew. And he was in with Dane Hollister, whose wife was the local chief of police. Which meant that the police, the shore patrol, and the Coast Guard all knew, too.

He needed to hide. Somewhere to hole up, to think. To be away from the rising wind and the roll and the black depths of the ocean and the horrors in it. Not Macready's Point. Even if _it_ weren't stalking him now, they would be waiting to take him when he docked. Costas and Hollister and the others.

The light. He'd never seen it lit, but it was there in his head: the lighthouse. The keeper's station. The keeper herself, as the dive boat had passed the island only hours earlier, her head bowed as she walked from one of the station's white outbuildings to the light tower itself, ignoring Crosley and his crew. Or pretending to, as always. Bitch. The snotty bitch.

Crosley thought he heard a rumble of thunder behind him, to the north. He didn't turn to look. He throttled up the engines and headed for Crow Island.

#####

#####

At the bottom of the access shaft, as Tom went to move farther into the laboratory, Mahoney touched his arm.

"Small steps, Tom," he warned. "Keep testing the water depth."

Tom nodded. He approached the nearest of the work benches, swept the beam from his flashlight over the ruined equipment. Beneath the dust and slime and corrosion, everything was covered in a thin black layer of grit.

"Soot," he said. "There was a fire."

"Or maybe someone set it intentionally." Nearer the wall racks, Mahoney was nudging something on the floor with the toe of his boot. A heap of what looked at first like nothing but black slime— until Tom, coming closer, saw the outlines of book boards.

Notebook covers.

One thing Tulley hadn't included in their gear pack was latex gloves. His lips curling back in disgust, Tom handed his flashlight to Mahoney. Then he chose the least-damaged book he could see, gingerly pried it free of the heap, and set it, dripping, sodden, as limp as wet hide, on the workbench.

What words might have been on the cover and spine had long since been lost to fire damage and mildew. Tom pried at the cover with gentle fingertips: it opened, finally, with an audible slurping sound. Inside, the pages were like paste, a dead gray, a thicket of handwritten notes blurred with mildew into inky florets.

"I'm going to keep looking around," Mahoney said.

Tom nodded absently. "Sure."

He re-angled his flashlight as Mahoney moved away, heading farther into the lab. The interior-proper of the book was, Tom quickly realized, useless, a bust. He focused, instead, on finding a title page, an index. As delicately as he could, he separated the first page from the wet grip of the cover. He managed to free about seventy percent of the page, which lay as frail and translucent as onion skin in the glow of his lamp; stamped in black ink faded to a ghostly, blurry brown he saw the words

**P JECT CR TOAN 1 .42**

Tom murmured the word as his brain filled in the missing letters: "Croatoan..."

From across the way, Mahoney called: "Tom, I found something. Look at this."

Tom left the book and ventured cautiously, stepping around work tables and debris, toward the glow from Mahoney's flashlight.

He found Mahoney standing at the first of a series of ceiling-high wood-and-steel scaffolds. There were dozens of them, Tom estimated, marching off into the darkness beyond the laboratory area. Hanging by hooks and chains from the racks were glass ampules of varying sizes. The ones nearest Tom and Mahoney ranged in diameter from roughly six inches to a foot; farther back, the ampules were much larger, three feet around or better.

Mahoney shone his light along a row of the smaller globes near the bench area. About half of them were broken— shattered, Tom guessed, by the heat of the fire; about half had lost their contents to time and evaporation. Mahoney's flashlight caught traces of something greenish-yellow through the dulled, soot-grimed glass.

Farther back, though, some of the larger ampules were not only intact but still, apparently, completely full. Tom felt himself practically drawn toward the glow his flashlight raised from a row of ampules hanging from a rack ten feet in: a row of globes just above chest level, shining like huge, yellow, dust-mellowed eyes in a black jungle of corrosion and rot.

A clipboard hung from the end of the rack, a sheet or sheets of paper still pinned, unburned and as if frozen in half-flutter, under the clasp. Mindful of his footing, Tom stepped toward the rack. Mahoney followed.

The sheets were war-paper, thin and highly acidic: they began to crumble as Tom gingerly lifted the clipboard free of its hook. And they contained nothing more than what appeared to be lot numbers and dates— no doubt corresponding, somehow, to the ampules on the racks. The dates ranged from July 1941 through October 1942; the lots numbered in the dozens.

It was what Tom found beneath the pages that jolted him from curiosity and frustration to shocked realization: the phrase, stenciled in faded black on the rotting pressed wood of the clipboard—

**PROPERTY OF U.S. NAVY**

"It was the military," Tom said, half to himself. "They were performing experiments of some—"

Mahoney, turning to see what Tom had found, picked that exact moment to slip on the slimy floor. He grabbed the end of one of the racks to keep himself upright. A shudder ran the length of the rack.

One of the ampules broke free of its chain. Less than six feet from Tom and Mahoney, it dropped to the floor and burst.

No time to jump clear— and if, in so jumping, they might somehow have avoided knocking more of the things loose. The shattering glass missed them. The liquid didn't. They were splashed, not splattered, with the stuff. It was cold and sticky; it smelled weirdly of flowers, almost like lilacs. And though it didn't burn— Tom, practically paralyzed with shock and horror, stared at his spattered forearm, waiting for the liquid to eat into his skin— it was certainly staining.

"Shit. What is this...?" Mahoney asked. "Do you think it's radioactive?"

"No." Tom watched as the liquid seeped into the torso of his t-shirt. "It looks like some kind of marker dye—"

_Dye,_ he thought. _The ampules. The larger ones—_

Like something that could be affixed to floats or buoys. And burst against the hull of a ship. Or a submarine...

And there were racks and racks of ampules, those larger ones, marching off into the darkness of the cavern.

"Project Croatoan," he said to Mahoney. "That's what this place is. That's what the Navy called it—"

The colony that vanished from the North Carolina coastal island of Roanoke in the sixteenth century. A single, mysterious word carved in a tree: CROATOAN.

Dan Shellberg's uncle's U-boat, disappearing without a trace, likely between the Maine coast and the Grand Banks. The keeper of the Crow Island light, supposedly swept to his death in a storm. Both in or around November 1942...

"The fire," Mahoney said. "Was it an accident—?"

Tom shook his head. "There'd be bodies. Remains of some sort."

"Then why? Were they trying to cover something up?" Mahoney examined his dye-splashed hand. "Who started it, do you think?"

Tom gazed out through the racks. From where he stood, he could see dozens of intact ampules. In the darkness, he knew, far beyond the reach of his flashlight, were dozens, if not hundreds, more.

"I'm actually more curious to know," he said, quietly, "who put it _out_."

He gestured toward the rucksack; Mahoney passed it over. Tom dug out the radio, spoke into the transmitter:

"Tulley? Margaret? This is Tom. Are you receiving me?"

Crackle-and-hiss from the receiver, nothing more.

"Margaret, this is Tom. We've found something. Can you hear me?"

He and Mahoney listened to another ten seconds of static.

"We're too far underground," Mahoney said. "Between the rock and the metal down here, there's too much stuff between us and the boat." He looked at Tom. "What do we do now?"

Tom clipped the radio, still switched on, to the front belt-loop of his pants. The dye still wasn't burning his skin; aside from the fetid air, he wasn't feeling otherwise sick or poisoned.

"We keep looking around," he said to Mahoney.

#####

#####

_Out of sight but not out of mind,_ Matheson thought. _Or no news is good news. Take your pick, Maggie._

With a pair of red-rubber-encased binoculars, courtesy of Tulley, she scanned as much as she could of Devil's Island. Basically, what she saw was rugged sand-gold basaltic cliff and blocks of rock the size of the Bonneville, broken off and residing at or below the glass-green clarity of the surface of the water. She couldn't see the top of the island.

_If they find something, they'll let us know. _Tom could be absentminded when he was either distracted or too focused, but that's what the radios were for. And Mahoney was with him. They— and the Walfords— would have the courtesy to keep the others updated.

Beside her, and possibly as a show for her benefit, Tulley relaxed against the railing. He nodded back toward the hills on the mainland. "Good berry picking up there."

Reluctantly, Matheson lowered the binoculars, looked where Tulley was looking. In contrast with the sunlight glaring off the surface of the ocean, the hills were a distant, hazy shadow-gray. "Blueberries?"

"Yup."

"It's been years since I've had fresh blueberry cobbler."

"Got a recipe for that."

"Do you, now?"

"Mm hm."

He was pointedly not looking at her. Matheson's lips curled slowly into a grin. "I'll think it over, Mr. Tulley."

"I'd be obliged if you would, Doctor Matheson."

From the southeast, from out across the water, came a sudden whistling or keening. Like a sustained shrieking of gulls. Matheson turned toward the sound.

"What _is_ that?" she asked Tulley.

Tulley frowned. "Damned if I know."

"That's not the right answer, Dick."

"Agreed, Margaret." The sound was intensifying, seemingly approaching. Tulley went to the wheelhouse. He had the volume on the radio turned high enough so that he and Matheson would have been able to hear from the Walfords or from Tom and Mahoney anywhere on-deck; they'd heard nothing. He unclipped the transmitter, called: "Tom, Craig: can you hear me? We might have a situation developing here—"

No response.

"Structural interference?" Matheson suggested. And, knowing Tom— _damn it, Tom, pay attention—_ he and Mahoney could well be roaming around without having their radio turned on at all.

"For the Walfords, that's probably a given." Tulley took another scowling look southward, then went below. He emerged a moment later with a Winchester shotgun and a Browning single-barrel rifle. "Ever do any grouse hunting as a Long Island debutante, Margaret?"

"No." Matheson reached for the Browning. "But I regularly smoked my dad and my brothers at the trap-shooting range."

"Good enough."

Tulley took the Winchester, went to position himself where he could watch the ocean to the southeast. Matheson kept an eye on the island and its watery environs. No need for Tulley to tell her what they weren't doing— that is to say, calling either Macready's Point or the Coast Guard with a message along the lines of _Our friends are snooping around in and on an island that anyone with half an ounce of sense would consider off-limits, and we can't raise them on the radio, and there's a scary sound_.

All sarcasm aside, the sound was, indeed, frightening. A sawing, high-pitched ululation, it seemed to seep between the plates of Matheson's skull, practically drilling for her sympathetic nervous system, her flight-or-fight response.

_It's engineered,_ she thought, forcing her professional admiration as a psychologist to forestall a rising, primal feeling of fear. _Whatever it is, it's not natural. Someone _**_made_**_ this._

From his place at the opposite railing, Tulley called an answer to her next unasked question: "We'll give them twenty minutes. Then we're calling Chief Hollister."

"Got it."

With the rifle ready at hand, Matheson scanned the water around the island, around the _Fallen Angel_ itself. She wondered if Tom and the others could hear what she and Tulley were hearing. She wondered if any of them could see what was making the sound.

She found herself hoping, deep down in her bones, that they couldn't.

#####

#####

_What the hell _**_are_**_ they...?_

At first guess, the things belonged to family _Nephropidae_: like lobsters, they possessed two primary forward claws and, at best guess, six chitinous legs. Beyond that, they represented a species Craig Walford had never before seen.

Nor was he about to radio his and Terry's discovery, or their puzzlement regarding same, to Tulley and Matheson. Not only was Craig roughly one hundred and fifty percent certain that the two-way wouldn't be able to make itself heard through fifty-some feet of solid rock, but he knew, and knew absolutely, all percentages aside, that he and Terry were in very real and present danger: he'd seen the things hesitate, just for a second, when the light from the dive-lamps touched them. Now they were advancing with mindless, fearless purpose. The Walfords were _food_, nothing more, nothing less.

Terry, who had tolerated as much of her husband's curiosity as was conducive to their continued survival, let alone wellbeing, said: "Craig, we're leaving."

"Go, Terry."

Perhaps it was Craig Walford's imagination as he retreated back into the pool, but the creatures seemed to avoid the barrels near the water's edge. Not his imagination: as the water reached his waist, he saw several of the monsters at the back of the press turn and head back into the cave. But Walford didn't pause. Common sense, if not outright fear, trumped his curiosity. He fitted the mouthpiece of his regulator between his teeth, pulled down his mask, and dove for the access tunnel with his wife leading the way.

#####

#####

Tom and Mahoney made their way forward, the racks of ampules ranging in library rows to their right. At the far end of the laboratory, they found a wide, high opening, a square-walled passageway leading farther north. At the mouth, they paused, both of them listening: a sound, a scraping or clicking, seemed to be echoing softly in the distance.

Approaching— or was it? Tom, the acoustics of the place like wet cardboard wrapping the soundwaves in his ears, couldn't be sure.

"What _is_ that...?" Mahoney might have been speaking to himself. He took a couple of steps northward, shining his flashlight forward, into the blackness of the passageway.

Tom swept the beam from his own light to the side, along the walls. "Tim," he said, "look at this—"

On both sides of the passage, set into the floor, were aquatic holding pens, ten feet square or better, filled nearly to the top with brackish, black water.

And piled between the pens, scattered, too, on the floor at Tom's feet, were bones. All manner of bones.

Tom, staring, hollowly said: "Watch your step."

Mahoney held up. As he did, his left foot caught the crown of a human skull— a soft _klok_ in the wet air. With his flashlight, Tom followed the skull's haphazard path as it rolled into one of the holding pens and sank.

At the pen's edge, he saw a white something that wasn't bone: a shredded piece of wet, bloodstained cloth. Tom gingerly picked it up, let it uncrumple in the light from his flash, and found himself face-to-face with half a heavy-line drawing of a snarling bear. The mascot of the Maine State Black Bears.

It was part of the shirt Doctor Brand had been wearing under her lab coat when she greeted Tom and Margaret at the Happer Institute.

Tom coughed, remembering the woman's arm found on the beach north of town.

The bones. The _smell_.

_She's here, _he thought_. The rest of her. Something dragged her out here and ate her—_

Tom dropped the cloth and turned away from the pen, retching. He was still doubled over when Mahoney stammered: "Oh, shit—"

Something was swarming toward them across the floor, from the light-most end of the passage. Something black and glistening and segmented, a seeming multitude of bodies possessed of insect-like legs and huge, hinged claws.

Mahoney was frozen, staring.

"Go," Tom choked. "Go—!"

He and Mahoney fled the things in what amounted to a horrifying, ludicrous slow motion: terrified or not, they had to move carefully to avoid slipping on the slimy floor, and they were what now seemed a hellish distance from the juncture between the underworld and the surface.

They reached the access shaft and the ladder with the things literally, by the sound of them (and Tom wasn't about to waste time looking), snapping at their heels.

First into the shaft, Mahoney threw himself at the ladder. Three rungs up, he gasped, over his shoulder: "Do you think they can climb...?"

Half-panicked, wholly incredulous, Tom stared up at him. "I'm a physicist, not a zoologist," he sputtered. "How the hell do I know?"

He was two rungs up when the creatures reached the access shaft. He didn't look down. As the clicking of claws reached swarming proportions below him, he focused on the climb, on his breathing, on ignoring the savage beating of his heart.

Four rungs from the top, the radio caught on something, ripped free of his belt loop, and fell.

#####

#####

As she performed her chores, the keeper of the Crow Island light listened out to sea.

The dive boat had been by early that morning, right around sunrise; the _Fallen Angel_ had passed a couple of hours later, at distance. Now the wreckers, by the sound of it, were on their way back to shore. An unexpected but commendable nod to common sense on the part of those manliest of manly men: another in the summer's seemingly endless supply of storms was blowing in from the north, and it was due to hit some five hours earlier than the National Weather Service had originally predicted.

Cassidy was in the tower, about halfway up to the lamp room to perform the customary pre-storm check on the light, when she realized that something was off about the sound of the dive boat. From what she could hear, the boat was approaching directly, not passing. And, from the overpitched roar of the engines, it was heading for the island at speed.

She descended, pushing past Book, who, having just settled into his customary lying-wait at the foot of the stairs, looked put out as he stood and pressed his bulk into the stone wall to allow her to pass, and, on impulse, grabbed a megaphone from the equipment room in the tower's staging area.

The air was white with the glare that sometimes precedes a clouding-over. Shielding her eyes, Cassidy stepped from the tower just in time to see the boat disappear from view at the island's north end. She ran for the cliffs, shouting into the megaphone as she went:

"Ahoy, the dive boat! You are heading for the rocks! Steer clear!"

No response. No change in the pitch of the engines. Less than ten seconds later, she heard the terrible, grinding crunch as the boat struck.

Cassidy redirected her run, made for the keeper's house. She got the key for the launch from the hook-board inside the front door. Then she took the shotgun from the locked rack and loaded it.

Dangerous, she knew. Guns and unsteady watercraft were a risky mix. But she'd had too many mornings of the wreckers' catcalls and lewd gestures. They might have finally managed to put themselves on the rocks: that didn't make them any less the testosterone-amped assholes they'd always been.

And there had been something off, tremendously wrong, in the dive boat's approach to the island. Not just the fact that had steered straight for the north cliffs at ramming speed, but, in the second she'd had the boat in view, Cassidy hadn't seen anyone on deck.

#####

#####

They were nearly clear of the tunnel. Ahead, past Terry, Craig Walford could see the outer opening, the sunlight filtering down from the surface in the water beyond.

Fifteen feet. Ten.

He very nearly didn't feel it. Like a feather brushing past the left leg of his wetsuit.

A tentacle the color of dead human flesh. More, almost, like a gray tendril. Like the wrinkled-tissue arm of a Portuguese man-o'-war. It snaked past Craig from behind, wrapped around Terry's left ankle, and _pulled_.

She was yanked backwards, with force, into Craig, who, with the clarity that sometimes accompanies shock, thought _It knows what it's doing._ Disruption in a confined space, leading to panic: in a thrashing of arms and legs, Craig was slammed into the roof of the tunnel. He saw Terry hit her head; he saw her lose the mouthpiece of her regulator in a burst of bubbles, a gargled scream—

He saw her dragged away, back toward the grotto.

He couldn't see what was doing the dragging; he didn't care. He got a grip on Terry's flailing left arm, dragged himself past her shoulder, her waist, her legs. He heard his tanks scraping on the roof of the tunnel. He got his dive knife unsheathed.

He grasped the tendril and started to cut.

#####

#####

As it turned out, the things _couldn't_ climb. Above a roiling of oil-black shells and furiously snapping claws, both Tom and Mahoney managed safely to reach the surface.

But the world above had changed, and not for the better.

In the time it took Tom to descend into, explore, and escape a subterranean nightmare, the temperature had dropped at least ten degrees, and it was still dropping now. The air pressure was falling with it. At the top of the cliff above the Zodiac, feeling the hairs bristle at the nape of his neck, he turned to face north: a bank of gray clouds was rolling in like a stampede across the ocean.

Tom's eyes went wide. "Oh, my God—"

"Guess the National Weather Service was being optimistic," Mahoney said, as he started the climb down to the Zodiac. "Come on."

A sound was rising, too, twisted into the wind: a keening like the shriek of gulls. Only _different_. Tom recognized it as the sound he'd heard two days ago, on the way to Crow Island.

_Those aren't birds—_ Above Mahoney, Tom began his descent back down to the water. The Zodiac was now bucking at the end of its tie-line. He was certain he could hear distinct timbers in the shrieking. A call-and-response, otherworldly and awful.

_Voices_. At least two of them.

#####

#####

Things that weren't in the light-keeper's manual, things one should never do with equipment paid for at least in part by the good taxpayers of the state of Maine: among those things, Anne Cassidy was certain, would be tying a line between an open launch and a deck-boat that, while presently hung side-up on rocks in deep, cliffside water, was apt to slide free and founder at any moment.

She'd had no response to her continued hails as the launch approached the dive boat. She could still see no one on board.

What she could see, now, as she lassoed a side-hook on the boat and hauled the launch close, was blood. Pooled on the deck. Drawn in long smears to the railings.

Cassidy felt the motion seep from her muscles.

_I should have called this in,_ she thought, staring at the gore in front of her. _I was spooked enough to bring the gun. Why didn't I notify the Coast Guard...?_

A guttural creaking rose from the hull of the dive boat as the waves shifted it against the rocks. Beside Cassidy in the launch, Book growled. He was staring at the wheelhouse.

Movement within. A heavy stirring, a human groan—

Choices. One that was likely a mistake, if not just tremendously ill-advised. Wearing a life vest, Cassidy secured the tie-line and boarded the dive boat. She left the gun in the launch. Not only was the deck of the boat slick with blood, but it was pitched at an angle and unsteady as well: she would need both hands free in case she fell.

"This is Keeper Anne Cassidy of the Maine Light Service," Cassidy called, as she approached the wheelhouse. "I'm here to assist you. Please identify—"

A man pulled himself, half upright, against the frame of the wheelhouse door and stood staring at Cassidy with glazed, pain-stricken dark eyes. His hair was black and slicked against his head with water or sweat; he wore a gray wetsuit, unzipped to the sternum. His face was fishbelly pale and clammy.

Cassidy could see no blood on the fingers with which he was gripping the doorframe.

"Help me," the man said. His voice was rasping-raw. "Please—"

_No blood on his hands._ For some reason, that was the deciding factor. Cassidy went to him.

"Is there anyone else on board, Mister—" — Cassidy looked: the name was there, stenciled in white on the left breast of his wetsuit— "— Crosley?"

Crosley shook his head, coughing harshly. A spray of bloody phlegm joined the sickening mess on the deck.

"Wait here," Cassidy said.

She left him on deck. She checked the far side of the wheelhouse, went below, found no one else. No bodies. From what she could tell from the flooding she witnessed in the galley and the radio alcove, the boat was taking on water via a gash in the port bow.

When she returned to the deck, Crosley was waiting where she'd left him, still clutching the doorframe for support, his gaze glassy and distant. Cassidy put an arm around him, guided him into the launch. Book ceased his growling but not his disapproval: from his place in the bow, he watched Crosley like a sphinx as Cassidy untied the launch and steered them back toward the jetty.

#####

Crosley was mobile, but barely. He wasn't hurt, outwardly, as far as Cassidy could see, but there was bloody froth around his nostrils and mouth. _The bends_. Back at the jetty, she was able to get him out of the launch and, with effort, his arm heavy across her shoulders while she lugged the shotgun in her right hand, up to the keeper's house. The sky was clouding from the northeast; the wind was starting to gust, pushing down the air temperature. Cassidy could sense the coming rain.

"Monster," Crosley was muttering. "There was a monster. A monster. There was a—"

Cassidy got him into the house and onto the sofa. She went to the communications alcove, propped the shotgun against the wall, seated herself. She'd just picked up the radio handset when she heard movement behind her.

"It's alright," she said, half over her shoulder. "Stay down, Mr. Crosley. I'm calling the Coast Guard now—"

Something cold and hard pressed itself to the back of her neck.

Crosley was up. He had the shotgun.

"Hang up," he said.

Cassidy re-bracketed the transmitter.

"Stand up," Crosley said. "Keep your hands where I can see them."

A low growl rumbled forth from Book. He'd risen from his usual post-voyage place behind the sofa, and he was going into monster mode, his shoulders hunched, his teeth bared—

"Shut him up, or I'll shoot him," Crosley said.

_No. No, no, no._ "Book," Cassidy said, "be quiet." Her voice sounded weirdly calm in her ears. When Book continued to growl, she added, as smoothly and reasonably as if the suggestion were printed on a card for Crosley to see: "Let me put him in the washroom."

Crosley nodded. He tracked Cassidy with the shotgun as she crossed the room. It was as if she could still feel the muzzle touching her skin. She led Book back through the kitchen to the washroom off the laundry. He wore no collar, here on the island; she had to do no more than touch his neck and, troubled as he was, he went where she wanted him to go.

When she shut the door behind him, she thought _It's over_.

Knives, in with the cutlery: she'd never even get the drawer open. The door leading out of the house: run, and there she'd be, dead or crippled, face-down on the stony front path, with two bloody craters in her back.

Crosley motioned her back into the living area. "I need the key to the launch."

Behind the washroom door, Book began to bark furiously. The sound boomed through the house. Shaking, Cassidy took the key from her pocket and offered it to Crosley.

Crosley ignored it. "Shut him up!" he said. He was staring wildly past Cassidy, toward the kitchen. "Shut him the fuck up!"

"Just go. Take the fucking boat and go—"

"I'll shoot him. Shut him— Why the fuck is he—" Crosley pushed past Cassidy, took aim at the washroom door—

Cassidy grabbed the barrels of the shotgun. "No—!"

Crosley backhanded her. Cassidy tripped, fell hard, sat for a long moment with the wind punched out of her and black spots swimming before her eyes. Crosley aimed the shotgun at her head—

"Book, be quiet!" Cassidy shouted. She was looking directly into the black mouths of the twin barrels. "_Book—_!"

Miraculously, Book went quiet. No sound from beyond the door but a low, engine-like growl.

And still: "Make him stop—" Crosley muttered. He lowered the shotgun, rubbed at his right temple. "He's still— Make him stop—"

Cassidy took a deep, slow breath. "Mr. Crosley, you're not well. I think— I think you have decompression sickness. Let me call for help—"

"Get up."

Cassidy got to her feet, stood with her hands at her sides.

"Turn around," Crosley said calmly.

In the laundry room, Book was still growling. Cassidy turned to face the living-area windows. One last look at the black rocks, the clouding blue sky, the troubled gray ocean.

"Please don't shoot my dog," she whispered.

Something heavy and hard hit the back of her head. The world went black as her knees buckled.

#####

#####

It wasn't until he and Mahoney were nearly back to the _Fallen Angel_ that Tom realized that, in their rush not to get eaten by the crab-creatures, not only had he managed to lose the radio but that he and Mahoney had abandoned the rucksack— along with the flashlights— in the laboratory as well.

_Tulley can bill me,_ he thought. Waves were smacking the bow of the Zodiac, dousing him and Mahoney with bursts of cold spray. Through the roar of the outboard, the volume of the shrieking no longer rose, but it was if the sound were seeping into Tom's being at a molecular level, triggering a primal mammalian flight response.

Rounding the north end of the island, they plowed into even rougher water, met increased resistance from the wind. The _Fallen Angel_ lay at a rolling anchor no more than sixty yards from the largest of the sea caves. Mahoney drew alongside; Tom took the end of the tie-line with him as he leaped aboard.

He saw only Tulley and Matheson. She asked, worry and relief sharing the frown on her face: "Tom, are you alright? Did you find anything—?"

"Yeah, Margaret, we're fine. We found— oh hell—" Tom shook his head, trying to clear some of the alien shrieking from his mind if not his ears. "It was _us—_ it was the Navy. Not the Germans. It was during the war: they were doing experiments of some sort—"

"Experiments? What kind of experiments—?"

With quick, wordless efficiency, Dick Tulley took the rope from Tom's hands and finished securing the Zodiac; Tim Mahoney, now aboard, looked around and asked the question Tom hadn't:

"Where are the Walfords—?"

Twenty feet from the boat, a gurgling commotion burst up through the waves. Craig Walford surfaced, holding his wife from behind. Terry had lost her mask and her mouthpiece; she wasn't moving. Even before Craig could spit out his own mouthpiece and yell "Help!", Tim Mahoney was kicking off his boots. He dove in, swam for the struggling pair. Tom kicked off his own shoes and followed suit, if only— and this he thought with ironic clarity in the mounting chaos of the moment— because Craig Walford was apt to punch Mahoney if he tried to touch either Terry or the Walfords' damned equipment.

He needn't have worried. Either sheer gratitude or common sense was beating down Walford's earlier pugnacity: he willingly accepted Mahoney's assistance in getting Terry back to the boat. Tom, blinking salt water from his eyes, could see gashes, clean, razor-like tears, in Walford's wetsuit. Walford himself, though moving, seemed either stunned or exhausted or both.

"Need help...?" Tom asked.

"No. I'm okay." Walford shook himself, swam to help Mahoney with Terry.

Tom was moving to follow him when he heard a shout from Matheson: "There's something in the water!"

He shouldn't have turned. Really, if he'd had any sense at all, he would have focused on nothing more than getting himself and the others back to the boat. As it happened, however, Tom paused, hesitated when he shouldn't have, looked behind himself and Walford. A gray something, a fleshy ridge, was moving toward him at speed, rising from the water. Tom froze. He saw, or _thought_ he saw, just below the surface, a great dark eye—

A hard _pop_, a retort cracking against the rock of the island. Gunfire. A piece ripped from the fleshy ridge with a wet _plap_.

The ridge shifted course to the left, submerged.

"Tom, damn it: swim—!" Matheson yelled.

Tom turned and followed Walford, who was already nearly to the _Fallen Angel_. At the railing he saw Dick Tulley, shouldering a rifle, covering Tom's and Craig's retreat. Tim Mahoney and Matheson were at the side ladder, hauling Terry Walford onto the deck.

Walford reached the ladder, hoisted himself up it, didn't protest as Mahoney helped him with his tanks. He was looking, panting and mute, at Terry, who was now stretched out on the deck with Matheson kneeling beside her. Tom, shaking, waiting for something to grab him from behind and drag him back into the water, climbed on board after him.

"Tom," Matheson said, looking his way. "Chest compressions."

Calm now, ever pragmatic, Matheson had detected enough spark in Terry Walford's limp body to try to bring her back to life. Having raised anchor, Tulley stepped around them on his way to the controls, leaving the rifle on an equipment locker at the fore of the wheelhouse. Tom, his back half to the railing and the water, focused, as Matheson was focusing, on Terry Walford. Pushed the heels of his hands into her neoprene-covered diaphragm, counted. Pushed. Counted. Felt the rise of the woman's chest as Matheson blew air into her lungs. Pushed. Counted.

Terry choked, coughed a mouthful of seawater into Matheson's face.

"That's it," Matheson murmured, easing the younger woman onto her side. "That's a girl..."

Tom relaxed back on his knees, helping Matheson keep Terry steady while the rest of the water emptied from the woman's lungs. The _Fallen Angel'_s engines rumbled to life. Tom was on the cusp of looking up with an encouraging smile for Craig Walford when the world exploded.

Or that was how it seemed. To his right, Tom sensed rather than saw a roiling of sinuous gray movement.

Tim Mahoney yelled: "Look out—!"

At the sound, Tom's flight response paradoxically froze him in place. Which was just as well, as it likely kept him from getting his head blown off a split second later.

One shot. Two. Three. The sound of glass breaking, a shout from Tulley—

Something cold and fleshy and wet splattered Tom's face. Something else— something hard and sharp— struck his right temple. He saw Matheson, as if in slow motion, horror in her eyes, fall backwards and scoot herself away, across the deck.

Tom turned in time to see a thick gray tentacle, black ichor seeping from its blasted tip, snake back off the stern and into the water. Mahoney, wild-eyed, stepped forward with the rifle shouldered—

Dick Tulley stepped from the wheelhouse and took it from him. "Bloody _hell—_!"

Numbly, Tom felt his right temple. His fingertips came away covered in blood. At least one of Mahoney's shots had hit the monster. One of the others had shattered the side window of the wheelhouse.

The third had hit the radio.

Ahead of the clouds, driven by the wind, a curtain of rain sluiced from the sky. Tulley looked with patient accusation at Mahoney. "Don't suppose you managed to hold onto that radio I gave you," he said.

Mahoney looked at his feet, mumbled a "No."

"You, Craig...?" Tulley asked.

Walford, who'd pulled Terry away from the railing and was holding her protectively under the boat's awning, shook his head. "We lost the gear bag when that thing attacked us."

Under the water, out of sight, something brushed along the _Fallen Angel_'s hull. Something heavy enough to send a shudder up through the feet and knees of those on board.

"We're getting out of here," Tulley said. He returned to the wheelhouse, took the engines from a rumble to a roar.

Below the waterline, something slammed into the hull with force enough to knock Tom, now standing, nearly back off his feet. He caught himself against the side of the wheelhouse, grabbed Matheson's arm to keep her from falling. A moment later, Tulley had them underway, but something in the motion of the boat felt wrong.

As if they were dragging something huge and heavy through the rough water. "Something's fouling the prop," Tulley called, over the engines.

Matheson, with Tom in her wake, went to the wheelhouse door. "Can we still navigate?" she asked.

"Yeah. Feels like it's trying to slow us down, though," Tulley replied.

Tom, his temple stinging, felt nearly vertiginous at the implications. _Trying_.

Meaning _It can think. It can plan_.

Matheson kept her tone reasonable: "Can it sink us?"

"I'm not sure," Tulley replied. "Take the wheel, Margaret."

He switched places with Matheson; he pushed his broad self past Tom. He went to the Zodiac, in tow alongside the _Fallen Angel,_ and hauled the boat in to arm's distance. He tied off the rudder, started the motor, and cut the tow line.

The Zodiac surged away from the _Fallen Angel,_ heading north, away from the island.

"What are you doing?" Mahoney was incredulous for all the rest of them. "What if we need that—?"

Returning to the wheelhouse, Tulley ignored him. He brought the _Fallen Angel_ around, and gunned them, as best as he was able, south-south-east.

The Zodiac continued on its way into the approaching storm. A hundred yards away, its distance increasing in the _Fallen Angel_'s wake, the inflatable left the water. Something gray and massive hit it from beneath, punched it clear of the waves. The boat overturned, its motor spluttering and dying, as a mass of tentacles surged over it.

"The _fuck—_" Mahoney exclaimed.

Dick Tulley leaned out of the wheelhouse long enough for a glance back. "Not a good day for small craft, is it, Mr. Mahoney?" He returned his gaze forward. "We'll make for Crow. Doubt our followers would let us get as far as the mainland. We can radio the authorities from the light station."

No one protested; no one argued. From under the canopy, blinking rainwater from his eyes, Tom watched as the gray tentacles dragged the Zodiac beneath the waves.

_That's it,_ he thought. He was no longer shaking, neither from shock nor wetness, nor from the increasing cold. Blood was trickling down his cheek from the cut on his temple, and an odd calm suffused his bones._ That's the thing that killed Robert._

#####

#####

_The scent was in the water._

The creature had no sense of time. It knew light and dark; it knew how to stalk and to hunt and to kill, though it had no words for any of those things. It had purpose, not language, a purpose that had been passed down for seven of its generations. (Its lifespan would be brief— no more than a dozen years, likely, but it couldn't know that, either. It would feel no remorse as its body weakened with age, no sense of failure, fear, or regret when it died.) Its progenitors had been programmed seventy years ago with behaviors that to subsequent generations were as ingrained as instinct: Monitor, maintain, muster, and—

_— attack_.

It had received the signal. It and its lesser fellows. They gathered their instruments of chaos, left Devil's Island, and followed the crippled boat...

#####

#####

The wind continued to rise, coming in cold blasts from the north, as the temperature fell. Darkness fell, too. The _Fallen Angel_ labored southward through the deepening, punching waves.

Tulley's passengers had gone below, all save for Mahoney, who was shadowing him in the wheelhouse, and Tom, who, with a second rifle, a Browning, was keeping a self-appointed watch in the stern. Matheson, who'd been below checking on the Walfords, joined him on deck. She carried a first-aid kit.

"Come here," she said.

Tom followed her out of the rain, under the canopy at the fore of the wheelhouse. Matheson motioned for him to sit with her on the equipment locker; he did. "How's Terry?"

Matheson replied as she opened the first-aid kit: "Mostly shock. I don't think she suffered any neurological damage."

Tom said: "That's good." But he'd seen: Terry Walford's injuries included more than near-drowning. "Did you see the marks on her ankle, Margaret?"

Matheson nodded. "Like the ones on Robert's face."

Tom swallowed. He looked back out to sea. "That's the thing that killed him."

In reply, Matheson took him by the jaw, turned his face so that the light now shining from the wheelhouse could illuminate his cut temple. "Sit still," she said gently. She added, on closer examination, matter-of-factly: "This might need stitches."

Tom, the rifle in his lap, his eyes on the waves to the north, nodded absently. He didn't feel the sting of the antiseptic.

#####

As they approached Crow Island, Tulley leaned from the wheelhouse, scowled into the gusting rain. "Where the hell is the launch?"

Ahead of them, the dock was deserted. The ocean frothed and surged at the edges of the empty stone jetty. Tom, looking farther up onto shore, could see no lights from the keeper's house.

Tulley brought them alongside the dock, cut the _Fallen Angel_'s engines as Mahoney tied the boat's lines. Matheson went below, to help Craig get Terry up on deck.

Still carrying the rifle, apprehensive and alert, Tom stepped onto the jetty. In the failing light, diluted with rain-spatter, something dark and sticky glistened underfoot. He bent down to touch it.

_Blood._

#####

#####

#####


	9. Chapter Six: Tom and Anne

**A/N: **This is it, folks. Kind of wiped out here, so I'm just going to say thanks for your patience, thanks for reading, and thanks for putting up with this thing. It's been a long, strange trip...

#####

#####

**Chapter Six: Tom and Anne**

The rain sluiced, and then stopped, then sluiced again, as if catching its breath before spitting once more into the buffeting wind. The light continued to fail. It was just past four; it might have been after sunset, an eerie bruised twilight in which Tom found it difficult to focus.

Aboard the _Fallen Angel, _Dick Tulley quickly packed another of what now seemed an omnipresent collection of canvas rucksacks. The first-aid kit. A tool kit. Flashlights and stick matches. And two boxes of ammunition. A cardboard box of cartridges for the Browning, a box of shells from which he loaded the Winchester. "Tom, you check the light," he said, as he he and his passengers started up up the path to the keeper's house. "Mr. Mahoney, have a look at the outbuildings, if you'd be so kind."

Tom had the Browning in his hands; Mahoney cast half a hopeful look at the shotgun Tulley carried. Having lost his boat's radio to Mahoney's marksmanship— the miracle there, idiotic as it was, being the fact that Mahoney had managed to hit the transmitter without hitting Tulley himself— Tulley shook his head.

Tom glanced back at Matheson, who frowned him a _Be careful_, the contrast between the pallor of her face and the darkness of her eyes almost shocking in the weird light. He nodded, headed for the lighthouse. To his right, the door of the keeper's house stood open. The windows glistened an oblique liquid gray, as if the place were filled with mercury.

From inside, muffled and violent, came the sound of a dog barking.

Tom started. _Book—_

He looked back at the others, at Tulley. Tulley, his expression set and grim, waved Tom on.

#####

She was nearly on her feet when they found her. Or she'd been on her feet, and had fallen again, and was only once more getting up. She'd lost track. Anne Cassidy passed Dick Tulley and Margaret Matheson and two others, a strange man and woman, at the juncture of the kitchen of the keeper's house and the living area. They might not have existed, or she might have been a ghost: she moved through them with singular, blind purpose and, while Tulley reached to steady her and Matheson and the others took in the wreckage of the communications alcove, opened the door of the washroom off the kitchen and freed Book.

He surged out of the bathroom, a slobbering tide of frantic muscle and hair. Cassidy sank to her knees, wrapped her arms around the dog's neck, pressed her face into the thick black fur of his shoulder. Tulley knelt beside her. "Annie—"

Matheson, switching on the light in the living area, finished his question: "— what happened here?"

Cassidy, for the moment, didn't reply. She breathed in Book's warm scent, held on to his solid dog bulk. Her head hurt. Tulley tentatively touched her skull. A sting, a sticky hitching between hair and skin, as his fingertips met her scalp.

"His name was Crosley," she heard herself say. "One of the wreckers. It was on his wetsuit—"

Tulley guided Cassidy to her feet. In the light from the corner lamp she saw what they'd seen already, Tulley and Matheson and the man and woman Cassidy didn't know, standing mute and worried off to the side: The shotgun was missing from the wall rack. The communications area had been torn apart. The parts locker had been hauled from the closet behind the PC desk and smashed open: pieces of the backup radio were strewn across the floor.

Matheson joined Cassidy and Tulley, her expression a mixture of shock and concern. "Miss Cassidy— Anne— did he— did he hurt you?"

"He hit me. That's all. He—" Cassidy stopped. She stared at the destruction in the communications alcove. A sick awful panic shook the coherence from her thoughts. "He wanted the launch— Oh, fuck. Did he do anything to the light—?"

She broke free of Tulley, propelled herself toward the door of the house. Before Tulley or Matheson could stop her, she was out into the darkness and the rain-spattered wind with Book at her heels. Stumbling, she ran for the lighthouse.

She reached the tower just as someone stepped out.

#####

Tom had the Browning. As if he would have had the guts to use it, if push came to shove. As if it did him any good now, when he actually _was_ shoved. In the narrow doorway of the lighthouse, Anne Cassidy bowled into him and hooked a right elbow into his jaw. As Tom stumbled back into the tower's lower-level staging area, she kneed him, knocked him down, and took the rifle away from him.

The stone floor punched the wind from Tom's lungs. With pain bursting like firecrackers in his groin, he tried to protect his head. Blindly, he threw out a hand. "Anne- Miss Cassidy— _Don't._ Please. It's me— It's _me—_"

He looked up at her desperately as lightning flashed outside the tower. He had a carbon-arc image-flash of her face, wide-eyed, her expression frozen between shock and horror, and then Cassidy switched on the staging-area worklamp. A naked bulb in a steel cage to the right of the door. Tom felt the light illuminate his face—

Cassidy stared down at him, and her shoulders slumped. She turned away, tipped the Browning against the tower's stone wall. She sank down beside it, put her hands over her face, and started to sob.

It was then that Tom realized why Matheson had looked at him strangely earlier that day, over breakfast the day before.

He hadn't shaved. Not today, not yesterday. He couldn't bring himself to look in a mirror, for fear of seeing Robert's face in his. He grew hair like a madman. After only two days, he would be sporting the coarse beginnings of a dark ginger beard.

Now, bedraggled and wet, wild-eyed from fear and stress, he had become his dead brother.

With the realization gyroscoping in his brain, Tom half-crawled to Cassidy, knelt beside her. "Miss Cassidy, it's me. It's—"

Cassidy didn't speak. She drew a ragged breath, threw her arms around him, clung to him. Held him so tightly that Tom could feel her fingers bruising his skin.

"Miss Cassidy," he said, struggling to keep his voice even, "it's Tom. I'm Tom. Tom Buckley."

A long moment of denial. A longer moment in which she simply held onto him and cried. Tom embraced her gently, feeling awful for upsetting her.

_Margaret, why didn't you say something?_

Not that he would ever ask Matheson to her face. He didn't need to. He knew the answer: She hadn't wanted to harp on him when he was down, hadn't wished to criticize when Tom was raw with grief. Of course she meant him no harm. And he knew— of course he did— that she had no way of knowing that Tom in Robert's skin would come face-to-face with Anne Cassidy, especially if that encounter were to be more or less predicated on an attack by sea monsters.

"I know who you are." Cassidy's voice was flat and soft. She drew away from Tom, seemed to have to force herself to look at him. She wouldn't— or couldn't— make eye contact. "I'm sorry I hit you. I was— I rescued one of the wreck divers. He attacked me. I think he stole the launch."

"It's missing. Tulley said so when we arrived."

"Shit."

Book nosed in between them. He snuffled Tom; Cassidy hooked her arm for a moment across the dog's massive neck. She got up, stood unsteadily.

"I have to check the light," she said. She started up the curving steps leading to the lamp room. Afraid for her equilibrium, mental as well as physical, Tom rose; he called after her: "Do you want me to come with you?"

She looked back at him. At the Browning, still tipped against the wall. "Keep watch. I'll be right down."

Her expression said something different: _I don't want you near the light._ Tom nodded, picked up the gun. While Cassidy ascended to the lamp room, he kept an eye on the rain-whipped darkness from the door of the lighthouse. Book waited with him.

#####

#####

Somehow, Randy Crosley reached the mainland without passing out, without an embolism trapping itself in the arteries of his brain and killing him. The pain was still with him, and worsening. With him, too, he knew— he just _knew_, could feel it like a dank shadow pressing against the skin of his neck— was the _thing_.

Not that the creature was the only entity pursuing him. The police would be waiting for him at the town docks. Mainly dark now they were, save for the end-lights shining red and white through the mounting darkness and the wind-driven pockets of rain, but that was a ruse: Hollister's wife and her trigger-happy hick minions would be there when Crosley tied up. The police, possibly the FBI, too. Waiting to grab Crosley, the harbinger of monsters.

So Crosley took himself and his monster elsewhere. Somewhere nearer his target. He headed north of town, past the beach cove, and steered the launch through the open doors of the boathouse at the base of the hill leading up to the Happer Institute.

A steel-hooded worklight illuminated the boathouse: no one was around. Crosley nudged the launch into a slip near the doors and cut the motor. He sat for a long moment while his skin tingled and his blood burned. He listened to the wood creaking in the building and the dock, felt himself rocking gently to the ghost of the launch's wake.

He thought how he didn't want to die in a wetsuit. Not on dry land, anyway.

Crosley got out of the launch, tied the bow line. A row of steel lockers stood against the inner wall of the boathouse. Crosley opened them, found nothing useful in the ones that were unlocked. He began breaking the rest open with the butt of the shotgun he'd taken from the light-keeper's house on Crow Island. In the third locker he found a greasy gray pair of coveralls, a pair of brown leather work boots in roughly his size. Crosley changed out of his wetsuit. Blood oozed from the pores on his arms and torso and legs when he peeled away the neoprene; nauseated and dizzy, with cramps twisting his gut, he put on the coveralls and boots. He took the shotgun, left the boathouse, and headed up the dark trail to the building where Stephen Costas had his laboratory and office.

_Got a special surprise for you, asshole._

#####

#####

No gunshots from the direction of the lighthouse. No screams or shouts. At the door of the keeper's house, Dick Tulley scowled toward the tower.

Matheson touched his arm. "Tom's up there, Dick. He'll look after Anne."

"It's how _she_ might look after _him_ that has me worried. Annie can be dangerous when she's upset."

"Dangerous—" Matheson looked at him questioningly. "How do you mean...?"

"Army reserve, a couple years back. This is what she told me. A young fella in her unit. He cornered her; he tried to force her to— to—" Tulley caught himself, glanced at Matheson, looked away. He left the doorway, went to join the Walfords, who were taking stock of the damage in the communications area.

"Two radios," Craig was saying. "A pile of parts. Almost enough to rig a working set—"

"_Three—_" Terry, on her knees on the floor, surrounded by bits of broken electronica, looked up at Tulley.

Tulley nodded. "The set from the _Angel_." He looked to Matheson, now standing beside him in the entryway of the living area. "Come on, Margaret."

Matheson followed him from the house. Tulley switched on a flashlight when they were away from the house, shone it along the stony path. They were maybe a hundred feet from the jetty, the dock area and the _Fallen Angel_ how nearly black with shadow, Matheson only just opening her mouth to ask, not only as a psychologist but as a woman concerned for her friends, both old and new, what, exactly, Anne Cassidy had done to the young man who'd tried to attack her, when from the darkness ahead came a monstrous _whump_.

Another _whump,_ immediately after the first. A violent splashing, a cracking as of wood or fiberglass against stone—

"What the hell—" Tulley broke into a run. Matheson ran after him.

They reached the shore just in time to see the monster that had overrun the Zodiac in a thrashing mass of tentacles— or a monster very much like it— sink the _Fallen Angel_.

"God damn it: _no—_!" Tulley, disbelieving, shocked and furious, bolted for the water as the thing heaved itself onto the boat, threaded its tentacles through the wheelhouse, in a shattering of glass and a splintering of wood, and heaved the horrible gray bulk of its body backwards. With a groan, the _Fallen Angel_ tipped, broke loose of its mooring lines, turned turtle, and sank. Matheson grabbed Tulley's arm; inconguously she thought, at that very moment: _My phone._ She'd forgotten about it. Her Nokia, in her purse.

Locked in the trunk of the Bonneville, parked at the Macready's Point dock.

Tulley strained against her grip, trying to get to the jetty. Matheson held on to him. "Dick, don't—"

"Wait." Abruptly, Tulley stopped fighting her. His attention seemed to shift to a point slightly ahead of the _Fallen Angel_'s former tie-up point. "What the hell is that...?"

Matheson followed his line of sight. Her breath hitched. A second creature was there in the water. This one appeared to be slightly smaller but bulkier than the boat-breaker, its tentacles seemingly less roped with muscle. As Matheson and Tully stared, it eased up to the jetty and opened a hideously wide mouth.

Something emerged from that mouth. Something glistening-black and crablike, with articulated claws. One something. Then another. And another. They swarmed out onto the dock.

And headed, as a group, right for Matheson and Tulley.

"Dick, let's go—!"

Matheson pulled Tulley back, toward the keeper's house. Tulley, trading curiosity and righteous fury for good sense, ran as she did. When they were just short of the door, they spotted Mahoney, moving midway between the station's outbuildings and the lighthouse. The things were a ways back, moving with purpose but unable to match the pace of running human legs on solid ground.

"Get Tom and Anne and get to the house," Tulley shouted at Mahoney. "Now!"

#####

"What is it...?" Tom asked, Cassidy's kick to his crotch still translating into a limp, as he and she and Mahoney left the lighthouse. Mahoney had burst into the staging area when Cassidy was nearly back down from the lamp room; she'd frowned at him— yet another stranger invading her island— while Book growled; he'd said, "Tulley wants us in the keeper's house now...!", and led the way back out into the windy failing light. To Tom's query, as Cassidy shut the tower door behind them, he continued: "I don't know—"

And then he added, by way of expostulation: "Oh, no."

A pocket of shadow a deeper black than the rest was coming up the path from the jetty. Oily-dark, glistening and segmented, accompanied by a chitinous clicking—

The things from the lab on Devil's Island.

"Go," Tom said to Cassidy, before she could freeze in place and stare. Beside them, Book started to bark. And suddenly the pain in Tom's bruised scrotum seemed far more surmountable. "Go—!"

#####

#####

Randy Crosley found Stephen Costas in his closet-sized glass box of an office. The lab area was empty. No student helpers slopping the aquariums or cleaning up. No sign, either of the blonde scientist— Brand, her name was, if Crosley's sick brain recalled correctly— hovering either by the clam tanks or messing with her lab equipment. Costas was on the phone; he turned, motion in his peripherals hauling his head around instinctively, automatically. He saw Crosley and visibly started.

"Gotta go," he said, to whoever was on the other end of the phone. "I'll call you back." He placed the handset on its black base.

"Who was that?" Crosley asked.

"Hollister. Just checking in." Still in his office chair, Costas stared up at Crosley. "Good God. Is that blood?"

Crosley glanced at the phone. _You're next, asshole_. "Got something you need to see," he said to Costas.

Costas frowned, openly suspicious. "What the hell happened to you?"

"Minor problem with my breathing gear. Nothing serious." Crosley kept his voice steady, while his chest and guts felt like they were going to split from the inside out. "I've got something to show you, Steve." Even now, in the man's fishbowl of an office, he could sense the creature behind him. Paranoia tingled through his brainstem, crawled like a centipede through the hairs at the back of his neck.

He realized then, too, standing in the dim after-hours lighting outside Costas's office, the lack of light hiding the clammy sweat on his face, that he'd forgotten the shotgun back at the boathouse. Turned out he didn't even need it. Costas's own damn greed did Crosley's work for him.

He watched as excitement replaced the distrust in Costas's eyes. "You found it...?" Costas asked.

"Yeah. We found it. Got a sample waiting down in the boathouse. Thought that made more sense than people maybe spotting it on the public dock."

"Let me get my jacket," Costas said.

#####

After that, once Costas followed Crosley down to the boathouse, the rest was easy.

"Over there," Crosley said, pointing along the dock to the slip where he'd tied up the launch from Crow Island.

"In that rowboat?" Costas asked, his suspicions reviving.

"Just a sample, man. Like I said." Crosley pulled the corners of his mouth into a smile. "Would've looked like a Navy parade, getting the dive boat in here."

Costas gave Crosley a bemused frown, then walked— a _clomp-clomp-clomp_, echoing off the water below the boathouse— along the boards of the dock to the launch. He looked down into the boat. Peered along its entire length, like he was trying to see under the seats.

Actually, the last thing Costas saw, down in the water next to the launch, was the creature's eye, big and black and deep as time. Then the thing snaked up a tentacle and caught Costas around the waist. He looked back at Crosley, his mouth open but not screaming, as the thing hauled him off the dock, and that was that.

Only not quite. It was kind of like the old story about the raccoon reaching into the oak tree to get the acorn, and not being able to get both its paw and the nut back out through the hole. The thing tried to drag Costas down between the launch and the edge of the dock, only there wasn't enough room. So it adjusted. Sent up two more tentacles to join the first, and proceeded to bend and break and snap and tear until Costas fit right down through that narrow space.

All of him save his head. The creature took the rest of him below the surface. The water around the pilings at the dock end roiled and bloomed with blood, then calmed. Costas's head stayed bobbing on the surface. Crosley watched it for a bit, until the water by the dock had gone just about as smooth as glass.

Then he called Dane Hollister.

There was a phone mounted on the wall near the light switch to the right of the boathouse door. Fucked up as he was, Randy Crosley still had a head for numbers. "We found it, Dane," he said, when Hollister picked up. How easy this was turning out to be. Crosley could feel the thing waiting in the water behind him. He smiled past the cramps in his gut and spat bloody sputum at the floor while Hollister asked a soon-to-be-dead idiot's _What...?_ "The treasure. Shit, man, you have got to see this..."

#####

#####

Tom, Cassidy, Mahoney, and Book reached the house less than twenty feet ahead of the creatures. Once inside, they shut the door, moved clear of it. Tulley had the Winchester; Matheson had the Browning. The house lights were off; someone had found two battery-powered lanterns, one for the kitchen and one for the living area, and had said lanterns set at their lowest illumination.

"The less light, the less movement, the better," Matheson murmured to Tom. "That's what we're thinking."

Tom nodded. He and Matheson and the others retreated to the living area and watched the door and waited for the clawing, the cracking, the breaking-through—

Nothing.

"What the hell are those things?" Mahoney asked, finally, his voice barely above a whisper.

"Sub-crackers," Tulley replied slowly. "That's my guess."

Matheson looked his way. "What...?"

"Submarine warfare, Margaret. An _organic_ form of submarine warfare."

"That almost makes sense," Craig Walford frowned like a bulldog in the dim light. "The best thing— possibly the only good thing— about doing battle against submarines, and I imagine it applies as much now in the atomic age as it did when the things were running on diesel and batteries: if you can breach the hull— by whatever means necessary— the sea will do the rest."

"So you train monsters to open cans," Tulley said. "Squid-like creatures— something with intelligence and dexterity— to pop the tops, carnivorous swarming beasties to eat the tasty treats inside."

Mahoney looked as nauseated as the rest of Tulley's audience. "So what do we do? If we just sit tight, how soon could we expect someone to notice?"

"I filed an itinerary with the harbor master, but we won't be declared missing until twenty-four hours after our scheduled time-in." Tulley shrugged, his face thoughtful and grim. "It's a pretty informal system, actually, around Macready's. They might miss us, they might not."

Tom frowned, thinking. "Those crab things— they can't be very smart, or they'd've found a way in here already."

"Could be," Craig Walford interjected, "that they're trained to key off of metal—"

"— or flesh," Terry Walford added. "Things they can eat."

Tom spoke again: "So they might not be recognizing the house as either dinner or a submarine."

Tulley nodded. "In any event, first things first: we need them gone."

"What do we have for weapons?" Matheson asked.

"One shotgun, one rifle. Altogether, roughly two dozen rounds of ammunition. Assorted hand-tools." Tulley turned to Cassidy. "Annie, what do you have on-hand for fuel?"

"The station's on wind and solar, mostly. Twenty-four-volt storage batteries with propane backup—" Cassidy realized she was talking mostly to herself. She looked at the others, at Tulley. "About forty gallons of gas, minus the stroke oil. In the fuel shed, past the generator house."

"So we shoot them or burn them, and then—" Tulley stopped. "Then what?"

"The dive boat," Cassidy said. "I went on board to rescue Crosley. From what I saw, the radio was still intact."

"So we kill the crab-creatures and send someone down the cliff to call for help. Simple," Matheson deadpanned.

"Simple enough." Tulley's smile was slightly morbid. "First, though, I need a volunteer." He looked at Tom, Mahoney, and Craig Walford. "How would you lads like to help me test a theory?"

#####

The things were there. The crab-things. Advancing on poor Mahoney, who, standing outside the half-closed door of the keeper's house, had to be fighting every instinct, every urge, to _run_.

Tulley's theory— and, right now, it seemed like madness (or just an extra serving of nuts on top of an insanity sundae of a day)— went thusly:

"Assuming these things were designed, trained, programmed, what have you, to create chaos aboard a submarine—" Tulley had expounded while all of them were still inside, as they mustered weapons. "— name three things you don't normally find on a sub."

"Women," Mahoney said, nervously glib, a little too quickly, earning a tripartite glower from Matheson, Cassidy, and Terry Walford.

"Firearms," Craig Walford gave Mahoney a pained look. "You don't want people shooting projectile weapons inside a pressurized steel can."

"Fire itself," Matheson added. "Assuming that these things— or their ancestors— were trained during World War Two, and given the potentially flammable concentrations of hydrogen from pre-nuclear battery banks."

"And maneuverability." Tulley spoke. "One long, narrow tube. Inherent crowding. Impossible for people to split up."

"You're thinking those things act as a unit," Terry Walford said. "Hive mentality. When they attack, they swarm a single target."

Tulley shrugged. "There's one way to find out."

Which led to Mahoney, outside in the pelting rain, looking not unlike a staked goat, as Tom and Craig Walford, leaving the house via the window at the north end of the laundry room, with Tom still carrying the Browning ("Just in case," Tulley had said. "Don't shoot unless you absolutely have to. At least not until we see how they behave."), circled out and got in behind the things.

The crab-creatures appeared, indeed, to be subject to a form of group tunnel-vision: they seemed to take no notice of Walford and Tom. From the kitchen window, Tulley shot one of the creatures with the Winchester. It took four rounds to put the thing down

"Not bulletproof," Tulley said, once Tom and Mahoney and Walford were back inside the house. "But not easy to kill. We'd be out of ammo well before the things were dead."

"And who's to say this is the only wave?" Tom asked. "There might have been hundreds of those things in the tunnels."

"I, for one, don't want to wait to see if that's true. Let's cook the ones we have. We can flank them and get the gas from the storage shed." Tulley looked around at the others. "Any protests from the science-types here present?"

"None from me," Matheson said.

Tom shook his head. "Me either."

"If you're asking if we want to keep one of those things as a sample," Craig Walford says, "I'll settle for one that's dead."

"And well-done," Terry added. "That's good enough for me."

#####

Mahoney continued in the role of bait. One casualty: the blade of the snow shovel he carried for protection, after Tom and Craig got in behind the things and threw a gas-soaked sheet over the greater creeping mass and Tulley tossed a handful of knotted flaming rags on top: the rain was still sparse enough to make for decent burning conditions on the open patch of stony ground between the lighthouse and the outbuilidings, but several of the things broke free of the now-panicking swarm and tried to flee, and most of them headed straight for Mahoney. He swept two of them aside with the shovel, and Tom hit the first of that two with the fire axe from the keeper's house, embedding the blade between two thick segments of shell midway along its back; the thing flailed furiously, snapping at Tom with its claws, until he swung it bodily, still impaled on the axe blade, over his head and slammed it to the ground with force enough nearly to split it in two; practically bisected, the creature twitched and died.

The third one was nearly on Mahoney when Mahoney stuck the shovel blade between himself and the thing's claws. Said claws sheared through the steel blade as if it were paper.

Mahoney, his eyes going wide, veered toward panic: he stepped backwards, away from the thing, and stumbled—

And Matheson moved in with the Browning and shot the thing right between its black eyestalks. It dropped on the spot.

"Thank you," Mahoney stammered.

"You're welcome." Matheson called to Cassidy, who, on the opposite side of the melee, was wielding the Winchester: "Between the eyes, Annie. It's a weak spot."

"Right," Cassidy called back, picking off another of the things before it could take a piece out of Craig Walford's leg.

It was over, with weird and terrible efficiency, within minutes. The Walfords stood by with extra gasoline; Tulley handled the fire. For all the horror that had gone into their diet, the creatures didn't stink as they burned. Tom wondered if there were something wrong with him: the smell reminded him of fresh king crab. Though he had a plausible and innocent excuse— he hadn't eaten since before nine that morning— he felt perversely hungry. His stomach rumbled as the things died.

#####

With the crab-creatures dead, the inhabitants of Crow Island faced part two of their plan for summoning assistance: getting down to the radio aboard the dive boat. The vessel was still where Anne Cassidy had left it, hours ago, hung up on the rocks below the north cliffs.

"Gonna make for a hell of a climb," Dick Tulley said. He and the others were gathered back in the living area of the keeper's house.

"The remains of the tramway. We might get some use out of that." Anne Cassidy continued before the others could ask: "A kind of scaffold-hoist-mining-car arrangement. Back when the lighthouse was being build, they used it to offload supplies from ships that drew too much water to dock at the jetty."

"Who's going to go?" Mahoney asked.

"Me." Tom spoke. "It's my fault that we're in this mess. If it weren't for me, none of you would be here."

"It's my _job_ to be here, Doctor Buckley," Cassidy reminded him, coolly. "How good a swimmer are you?"

"I'm a good swimmer," Tom replied. Cassidy was keeping her eyes focused directly on his. Practically daring him to look away. He kept his gaze even with hers. "And I know something about radio repair, if it comes to that."

"I should go." Mahoney hunched forward, his expression troubled. "That was our charter. Crosley Dives—"

"No," Cassidy said.

"Why not?" Mahoney asked.

"Book doesn't like you," Cassidy replied, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Mahoney looked disbelievingly from her to the dog. On cue, Book growled at him.

"If we need him," Cassidy said, "he'd help Tom before he'd help you."

Mahoney looked hurt. "How...?"

"Your scent. He knows you're one of the wreckers."

"But we never came within a quarter-mile of the island," Mahoney said, with sad wonder in his voice.

Cassidy shrugged. "Makes no difference to him, Mr. Mahoney."

Matheson spoke: "Why couldn't we just wait out the storm and signal for help in the morning?" She looked at the others. All of them except for Tom. "We should be safe in here. We have proof that the crab-things won't attack the house; the larger creatures can't leave the water."

"We _think_ they can't leave the water," Tulley countered. "Makes me uncomfortable, giving them time to reformulate their strategy."

"If we're going to go, we should do it while there's still light," Cassidy said. "The sun will be setting in less than two hours. And chances are more than good that the dive boat will lift clear of the rocks at high tide."

"So she sinks right around eleven p.m.," Tulley says.

Cassidy nodded. "If the waves don't swamp her before then."

Tom could still feel Matheson not looking at him. He glanced out at the darkness beyond the living-area windows. _What light...?_

Tulley slapped his hands together. "Let's get going, then."

"Right." Terry Walford turned to Tom and Mahoney. "You two: I need your clothes." While they hesitated, she asked Cassidy: "Clean rags, terry cloth: where—?"

Cassidy took one of the battery-powered lanterns and disappeared off into the laundry room. She emerged a moment later with a pile of rags.

"Do you have any men's clothing on hand, Anne?" Terry asked her.

"Yes."

Terry took the rags from her, handed half to Tom and half to Mahoney. "Get undressed. Wipe yourselves down with the rags."

"What if it's washed off?" Mahoney asked. "The marker dye, the lure, whatever it is. Wouldn't it have—"

"It's _waterproof_, Mr. Mahoney," Terry replied. "That's the point of it. Whatever you got doused with in that cavern under Devil's was meant to adhere to enemy ships at sea. That means it won't just wash off. We can worry about de-skunking you later—"

A dry chuckle from Tulley: "Time to bust out the tomato juice, eh...?"

"— for now," Terry continued, "we'll need what we can get off of you and out of your clothes."

"Bait," Craig intoned, when Mahoney and Tom continued to look blankly at his wife. "We're going to make some kind of chum. A distraction for those things in the water."

"Okay," Tom said.

By lantern-light, he and Mahoney followed Cassidy upstairs. In the closet in the main bedroom, she found clothes for them. A green t-shirt and denim work pants, probably belonging to one of the other-season keepers, for Mahoney, another t-shirt and a pair of khakis, worn by someone obviously less burly, for Tom.

Cassidy hesitated as she handed the clothing to Tom. Her fingertips lingered on the soft gray-heather cotton of the shirt—

_It's Robert's,_ Tom realized.

He kept his eyes from Cassidy's. By flashlight, he changed in the bathroom, while Mahoney, leaving the door open just enough to see by the glow of Cassidy's lamp, swapped out his clothing in the keeper's room.

#####

#####

Margaret Matheson's New York-licensed Bonneville was still parked at the Macready's Point docks. Not that there were parking restrictions in effect, or any town impound lot to tow the Pontiac to if there were, but the car's still being there meant that Matheson and Tom Buckley were still out on the ocean with Dick Tulley, with night coming and another damned storm blowing in.

_Tulley would have the sense to call in if anything happened._ Frances Hollister told herself that as she looked at the Bonneville through her rain-splattered windshield and the glow from the cruiser's headlights. Likely he had the _Fallen Angel_ tied up at Crow Island: a quick stop to check in on Anne Cassidy before Tulley and his passengers headed back to Macready's Point.

Which self-reassurance didn't expel Hollister's unease in the least. For now, she focused it elsewhere: Dane was missing, too. Or he'd left a cryptic message for Hollister on the cell phone she could only half figure out—

_Gotta go check on something, Fran. Might be late getting home. You don't have to wait up. Bye._

If he hadn't left a message, she wouldn't have worried. She would have finished her shift, checked in at the station, and gone home to leftover chicken soup and an hour or so of _Mystery!_ (she had a thing for David Suchet's Hercule Poirot and that silly little mustache of his) before bed without ever wondering where Dane had got himself off to. Would've assumed he was finalizing the details of a real-estate scheme at his office, or down with clients or friends at _The Shallows,_ or off to some poker night she'd forgotten he'd told her about, and that would have been it. But he'd gone and taken the time to leave her a voice mail, and something in his tone didn't seem right.

So here she was, in the failing light and the trying-to-rain, down at the docks, looking at the big back end of Margaret Matheson's Bonneville while she put out a call on the radio to her people in the field:

"Chief Hollister here. Anyone seen Dane or his truck within the last hour or so?"

She got three "Nopes," one a given from Dan Shellberg back at the station, the other two from Roy McAllister midtown and Carol Willis to the east, on speed patrol on the county highway. The third callback came from Ted Kingston:

_Kingston here, Chief. I'm on the north end of town, just south of County Road double-E. Think that was Dane's Escalade I saw heading toward the Happer campus._

"When was that, Ted?"

_About ten minutes ago. Want me to meet you there?_

Hollister hesitated. There were things that made you seem paranoid, things that might weaken you in the eyes of those you were supposed to be leading, and things that made you look like a class-A stooge of a police state, where cops could show up any- and everywhere unannounced and unwarranted. And then there were things that you did on instinct, never minding the badge and the gun and all the social-political hoo-haw that stood behind it, on a blind animal feeling that something was wrong. Very, very wrong.

"I'd be obliged if you would, Ted," Hollister replied. "See you there in five. Hollister out."

#####

#####

At the cliffs at the north end of Crow Island, about to attempt a free-climb down a cliff in the dark, in the ratty lashings of a mounting storm, Tom Buckley felt a sort of of dizzying bravado. _Really,_ he thought, _what could be easier? Or smarter?_

The idea of using the ruins of the tramway for any sort of footing or handgrips had been a kind lie on Tulley's and Anne Cassidy's part: he could see that. They had a hundred feet of rope. Old rope, at that. A fresh nylon coil had been in the launch that Randy Crosley had stolen. They had nowhere to tie the line off, so Tulley would be playing it out, wrapped across his broad back, while Craig Walford acted as his anchor and backup.

Not that Tom and Cassidy would be relying on them. The rope was meant for emergencies and guidance only: the climb itself was to be free-form and untethered. Cassidy and Tom would be relying on their own strength and agility.

"From here," she said, joining him at the edge, "we're no more than sixty feet off the water."

_Or off the rocks,_ Tom thought, looking down. But he could hear the attempted reassurance in Cassidy's voice; he smiled for her. "Almost close enough to jump for it."

"Almost." She smiled back at him. "Just don't look down once we start the climb. Don't look at the water. The motion can make you dizzy."

"Okay."

Matheson would be providing what sniper cover she could. Which, she and Tom and all the rest of them knew, was just one more fiction: those on the cliff top wouldn't be able to see anything of what was happening down below.

Seemingly gauging angles and distance, Matheson was looking down at the boat. Tom could read doubt through the stoicism of her expression.

"Margaret, I—" he began.

"Be careful, Tom."

Before Tom could say anything else, Matheson took the Browning and made way for Mahoney. "You might need this," he said, handing Tom a sheathed, fixed-blade diving knife. "A good knife can come in handy."

Tom took it, looped the sheath to the belt at his waist. He glanced toward Matheson, but she'd refocused her attention on the base of the cliff.

"Thanks, Tim," he said.

#####

"Book: stay."

Anne Cassidy's last words before she and Tom Buckley started down the cliff. Book looked at her doubtfully; Cassidy met Margaret Matheson's eyes, nodded toward the dog.

"Here, Book," Matheson said, firmly. Book went and sat down beside her on the cliff top.

_Look after him for me, Margaret,_ Cassidy thought. She broke eye contact with Matheson, looked down, checked her path. With Tom Buckley following her, she eased down into the space between the rocks and the skeletal remnants of the tramway at the top of the cliff and started to descend.

#####

#####

As Tom and Cassidy began their climb, Mahoney went to join Terry Walford at the jetty. Given the fact that Craig Walford was assisting Dick Tulley on rope duty, and fact that Mahoney was already doused with the marker dye from the laboratory caverns on Devil's Island, it only made— sick, twisted, and likely very dangerous— sense that he should be the one to assist Terry on monster-distraction duty.

They each had an old-fashioned red-and-white life ring tied to fifty feet of cord, all of which they'd found in the station's boat shed; the rings were wrapped and bound with Mahoney's and Tom Buckley's dye-contaminated clothing and with the rags with which Mahoney and Tom had wiped themselves down. Standing on the jetty south of where the monster had sunk the _Fallen Angel,_ Terry hauled back, cast her ring as far as she could into the waves, and towed it along the shore. Mahoney trotted about fifty feet ahead of her, making his way among the rocks strewing the ground past the jetty's end, and pitched his own ring out onto the water.

One cast, and nothing. He hauled the ring back in as the waves brought it too near the shore and prepared to toss it back out again. Not wanting to get rope-burn, he looped the end of the line around his wrist.

Terry Walford saw. "Wouldn't do that, if I were you," she called.

"Why?" Mahoney pitched the ring back. It bobbed away in the waves running atop the current off-shore. "There's nothing—"

Mahoney's line suddenly went taut. He was yanked off his feet and dragged, belly-flopped and flailing, across the ground. Terry Walford dropped her own line and sprinted his way, unsheathing her dive knife as she ran. She tackled the line, cut it mere seconds before Mahoney was dragged into the water.

The end of the rope hissed across the rocky ground and disappeared into the waves. Terry and Mahoney scrambled back from the water's edge. In less than five seconds he'd traded potential rope-burn for very real bruises and full-torso abrasions.

"What did I tell you?" Terry said.

"Thank you," Mahoney panted in reply.

Terry Walford nodded. She straightened, dusted herself off, and turned to face northward, where her husband and Dick Tulley and Margaret Matheson were stationed at the top of the island's cliffs. She took a flashlight from the cargo pocket of her khakis and shone two quick bursts of light there way.

A signal, pre-arranged. _The things are here,_ it said.

#####

#####

When Frances Hollister reached the Happer Institute, Ted Kingston was waiting in the parking lot out back. Kingston with his short but wiry-tough build, red hair, and gray eyes. He wore glasses with black plastic frames of the type that would go through either basic training in the USMC or a dozen bar fights without getting broken. He had them off, wiping rainwater from the square lenses, as Hollister got out of her cruiser.

Everything seemed pretty much locked up for the night. No one in reception, as far as Hollister could tell. What looked to be only utility lights coming from the windows of the lab building. But, sure enough, there was Dane's Escalade in the parking lot, sitting next to a late-model green Subaru Forester.

"Well, he's here somewhere, Ted," Hollister said to Kingston, there in the still-sputtering rain. "You take the residence cabins; I'll check the—"

And then: muffled shouts from the direction of the ocean, down below the institute's main building. Shouts and a sort of unearthly screaming, too. Kind of like gulls, only not.

And absolutely bloodchilling.

A half-paved path made its way, broken by runs of log-fronted steps and lit by metal-hooded lights set on a handful of poles, from the main building down to the institute's docks. Hollister and Kingston ran for the path and made their way down to the shore. The ruckus— the shouting, that horrible screaming— was coming from the boathouse midway along the docks.

Hollister burst in just in time to prevent a sea monster from eating her husband.

Granted, she didn't pause to take in the details. The thing was huge and gray and looked like some kind of squid. It was half reared up out of the water by the farthermost of the boathouse slips, and it was reaching for Dane with tentacles like boa constrictors while a big guy in coveralls herded Dane toward the thing with a damn shotgun.

And it had a pitch-black eye— or eyes, but Hollister, from where she was standing, could see only one— the size of a serving platter.

Had she been partial to Dane's taste in movies, those big dumb actioners where things were always blowing up and guys with biceps like bowling balls and forearms the diameter of telephone poles were never getting carpal tunnel from firing mule-kick guns nonstop, Hollister might have yelled something along the lines of "Here's what you get for having an eye the size of a plate, you a-hole monster!" As it happened, she planted her feet the way she was supposed to, took aim with both hands, one shooting, one supporting, and emptied all but one round from her full clip into that big dumb eye.

The one round that didn't go into the monster went into the guy who was trying to feed Dane to the monster at shotgun-point. Hollister asked herself in her head, even when it was happening, _Now, who in the hell does something like that—?_

Then the guy— he was beefy and tall, and black-haired, and Hollister was sure she'd seen him around town— one of those wreckers (_maybe, yeah_)— was turning toward her, and he still had the shotgun leveled, and that was good enough for Hollister. She shot him. The shotgun flew out of his hands as he went over. He landed on his back and didn't move.

Which left just the monster to take care of. The thing was slowing down by the time Hollister reloaded. She started firing again just as Kingston was reaching for a fresh clip for his Glock. All told, they emptied maybe sixty rounds into the thing before it had the good sense to lie down and die. It made one last rearing-up out of the water, while its horrible spiked mouth opened wide and its tentacles flailed, and then it fell over. At that moment, Dane did the one thing that he'd done for himself since Hollister and Kingston burst into the boathouse, and got the hell out of the way before the thing could land on him, there on the dock.

"Hell," said Kingston, reholstering his sidearm. "That's something you don't see every day."

"No, Ted, you don't," Hollister replied. "Check on Dane, would you, please?"

While Kingston did that, and Dane stood there like a scared puppy, shaking and in shock but otherwise unharmed, Hollister went and knelt beside the guy who'd had the shotgun. He was still alive. He was flat on his back, panting raggedly, and the eyes he had fixed on the ceiling rafters of the boathouse were bloodshot through and through. Blood was trickling from his nose. From his ears, too.

Hollister reached for her shoulder transmitter. "Dispatch."

_Dan here, Chief._

"Requesting EMTs ASAP at the boathouse below the Happer Institute. Got a male here, approximately thirty-five to forty years of age, with a gunshot wound to his upper torso and what could be decompression sickness."

_Roger that, Fran. You okay?_

"I'm okay, Dan. Thanks for askin'. Hollister out." She stood back up, winced as her right knee half-tried to lock. She turned toward her husband, still standing goggle-eyed on the dock. "Dane, I think you've got some explaining to do."

"Fran—" Dane only just seemed to be recognizing her. He came toward her, his hands out and palm-forward. Almost like he wanted her to see he wasn't armed. Almost, then, like he was afraid that she'd shoot him if he was. Truth to tell, Hollister thought, the jury was presently out on that second one. "I thought they were talking treasure. Relics. Something like this— oh, my God— I never thought—"

_That's the problem, isn't it, Dane? _Hollister thought._ Always has been. That "thinking" thing._ "Thought _who_ were talking, Dane?" she asked him. "Who are we talkin' about here—?"

Before Dane could answer, Kingston said: "Chief, you need to have a look at this."

Kingston had made his way carefully around where that sea-beast lay flopped like a dead rhinoceros on the dock. Hollister went to join him. An old white open launch was tied up in one of the slips. Not one of the institute's new-buy Zodiacs. Hollister felt her heart hitch when she read what was painted in red on the bow:

**CROW ISLAND L.S.**

There was something else, too. Of course, there had to be. Something else that Kingston wanted her to see. Bobbing in the murky water beside the launch:

A human head. Male, adult, dark-haired. Roughly forty-five years of age.

It was floating face-up, and its eyes were closed. Kingston said, his voice hushed, like he was afraid he might wake it up: "I think it's Doctor Costas."

"Doctor Costas from the institute: I think you're right, Ted." Hollister felt weirdly calm. Shock could be a very useful thing. It beat fainting or vomiting, anyway, every time. She called back to Dispatch: "Dan—"

_Shellberg here_.

"We've got a body here at the boathouse, too. And a large unidentified zoo specimen. We'll be needing forensics. Page Emil Sazerac, would you? And Dan—?"

_Chief?_

"Radio Crow Island, make sure everything's okay. Looks like someone stole the light-station boat."

_Roger that,_ Shellberg said.

The ambulance siren was howling in the distance. "Go meet the EMTs, Ted," Hollister told Kingston. "Show 'em where we are."

Kingston nodded and went. Dane was still where Hollister had left him, keeping his distance from the dead monster on the dock and from the water and whatever might be in it and, Hollister imagined, from Hollister, too.

It took Dan Shellberg less than a minute to validate the fear that had taken root in Hollister's gut the moment she saw the Crow Island launch: _I can't raise the light station, Chief. Annie Cassidy's not picking up._

_Could be she's up the tower, _Hollister thought. That damned antique lamp that the State didn't see fit to replace.

Or—

A man half-dead of the bends. A decapitated scientist. A stolen boat. Margaret Matheson's Pontiac still parked at the docks with night falling and a storm revving up. Dan Tulley taking Matheson and her creepy-but-sweet-enough Doctor Buckley on a damned fool trip out to Devil's Island, and Tulley's boat not yet back in port. Said Doctor Buckley's brother dead of causes more readily labeled "unknown" than "drowning."

And a sea monster lying in a heap not six feet from where Hollister was standing.

"Oh, hell," she whispered. She pressed the button of her transmitter and said, at volume, "Dan, you still there?"

_Ever and always, Fran._

"Raise the Coast Guard and the shore patrol. See who can get out to Crow Island the quickest. Think we've got an emergency on our hands."

#####

#####

As Tom and Cassidy reached the foot of the cliff, the setting sun cut underneath the clouds. For a moment, the air all around glowed a misty gold, and the water was topped with a blood-red sheen.

And then: darkness.

They were some fifty feet from the dive boat, and they still clung like spiders to the rocks. There was footing, but it was weed-strewn and slimy.

"My fingers are cramping," Tom said.

"Mine, too," Cassidy replied, tightly. "Relax, Tom. Keep breathing."

Again, he did as she instructed. Didn't question the obviousness of it— _Of course he would keep breathing as long as he was able. Why the hell would he stop—?—_ but found in the process a simple, practical focal-point. One that kept him moving while keeping fear from monopolizing his mind.

They were thirty feet from the boat— and it was still there, tipped at a sharp angle against the rocks— when Tom heard a rumbling behind them.

"Hold on," Cassidy said. "Hold on _tight—_"

A wall of water broke across their backs. It was as if the ocean drew a deep breath and blew out hard. Tom gasped at the cold, the shocking force with which the water mashed him against the rocks. It surged around his waist; he was nearly sucked free of the cliff when it receded.

"_Fuck—_" he choked.

"It's going to get worse," Cassidy panted. "Come on."

She kept moving toward the boat. It was then, following her, feeling his way in the dark and half-blind with salt water besides, that Tom realized what Cassidy had to have been thinking even before they started their descent: the danger of falling aside, sea monsters or no, this was apt to be a one-way trip for both of them.

#####

Still, they weathered another two surges in addition to the first, and the boat remained hung up on the rocks long enough, anyway, for Tom and Cassidy to reach it and haul themselves aboard. The deck was leaning at an ugly, shifting angle; Tom, slipping once and banging his right knee, found the footing slick not only with water but with—

"— _blood_. Jesus Christ," he said, having to hold his hand nearly to his nose to see the gore on his fingers.

"I know, Tom; I know. I think those things killed Crosley's crew." Cassidy paused long enough to squeeze his shoulder. "There were no bodies that I could see. Come on: we'll turn on our flashlights when we get below."

They entered the wheelhouse; they went below, half-staggering on steps pitched like a staircase in a funhouse; they unpocketed and switched on waterproof flashlights.

"Over here, Tom." Cassidy shone her light into the communications alcove, to their left. To their right and behind them, the bow of the boat was half-filled with water. It came up to Tom's calves where he and Cassidy stood.

Cassidy reached to switch on the radio; Tom caught her wrist. "Wait, Anne."

He met her puzzled eyes. "Go and stand on the steps," he said. She opened her mouth to protest; he repeated, patiently: "Go. Stand clear of the water."

He continued, with the calm of a man possibly to electrocute himself in the next five seconds or so, as Cassidy waded back and stepped onto the stairs: "If need be, we can dry the board. Should be too soon for corrosion—"

He flipped the switch. He wasn't electrocuted. A soft hum, and the face of the set glowed to life.

Tom released the breath he'd been holding. "— to be a factor," he finished, quietly.

Cassidy rejoined him. Tom stood back while she made their distress call, both to the Coast Guard and to the Macready's Point shore patrol:

"This is Keeper Anne Cassidy of the Maine Light Service, stationed on Crow Island, in need of assistance. Seven adults stranded and requesting evacuation by air. Repeat: evacuation by air. At present, there is extreme danger to small craft in the water adjacent to the island. Boat pickup not advised. Repeat: we are requesting evacuation by air—"

Cassidy stopped speaking, took her thumb from the transmitter button on the handset. Nothing but hiss from the speaker above the radio. She and Tom waited.

Waited.

_Annie, Dan Shellberg here._

"Copy, Dan." Cassidy grinned with relief. "God, it's good to hear you."

_Good to hear you, too. We've been worried. We'll get a chopper out to Crow as soon as we're able. Can you find a place to sit tight?_

"We can do that. Thanks, Dan."

_See you soon, Annie. Macready's Point out._

Cassidy hung up the transmitter and stood for a moment, head down, simply breathing. Water lapped; the boat creaked against the rocks. Tom reached out, gently rubbed the space between her shoulder blades.

"Can we make it back?" he asked softly.

"Of course we can." Cassidy gave him a weary smile. "Only— let's not race to the top, okay?"

"Okay." Tom reached for her hand, to lead the way back up onto the sloping deck. His fingers were bleeding; Cassidy's were, too. Tom only just realized it as they touched—

— and then Cassidy was yanked from her feet.

She shouted with shock and anger. She didn't scream. The tentacle wrapped itself around her ankles and dragged her into the darkness of the flooded bow, and Tom—

"No—!"

For a second, he froze, there on the steps. But for a second only. His mind ran the facts as they had to be, his scientist's mind, coolly and quickly: the boat was flooding at the bow. A hole there, a gash, through which the tentacle had come, and toward which Cassidy was being pulled—

The main body of the creature— there was no room for it in here— was outside the boat. Up top.

Tom hauled himself back up on deck, and it was there in the water between the dive boat and the rocks, something from a nightmare, massive and awful: the creature that had followed them from Devil's Island, the monster that had destroyed the Zodiac.

Tom unsheathed Mahoney's dive knife and flung himself at it.

And it _caught_ him. The thing snatched him in mid-leap. A tentacle shot out and wrapped with sinuous crushing strength around his waist and hauled him in—

— but that, Tom realized, was what he wanted: it allowed him to target the thing's awful eye. The eye, huge and round and dead-black from before, when he swam to help the Walfords at Devil's: he slashed at it now. Punched and stabbed. Cold black blood erupted from it, covered him in a discharge like crude oil. Tom, shouting now with raw animal fury— _This fucking thing killed Robert. It's killing Anne.—_ kept stabbing. The knife handle, slick with gore, twisted out of his hand; he clawed, then, at the eye, tore into it with his fingers, until he was inside the thing's head practically to his elbows.

The tentacle around his waist loosened. The creature spasmed violently against him. An unearthly horrid shrieking erupted from it—

And a tentacle swatted Tom clear of the dive boat.

He had an impression— time slowing, an ethereal peace, sudden, strange, and sustained, filling his body and mind— of flying through the air. The breath had been knocked from his lungs. He hit the waves and went under.

But not that far. Not that deep. The cold of the water was still shocking enough to revive him. Tom pulled himself to the surface.

He blinked the salt water from his eyes just in time to see the dive boat, toppled by the weight of the creature, roll clear of the rocks and sink.

_Anne_.

Tom shook his head, tried to focus. Somehow, miraculously, he'd managed to keep his airway clear; he wasn't choking. Below, through the water, in a slow, nightmarish spiraling-away, he could see the light from Cassidy's flashlight shining from the windows of the sinking boat.

He took a deep breath and dove.

He reached the boat twenty feet down, maybe more. He had no idea how far down the bottom was. He followed Cassidy's light. He swam through the boat's lower cabin, past the communications alcove, into the bow. Cassidy was conscious, her face pale in the light, her expression desperate and unbelieving and oddly calm, too. The creature, in dying— or so Tom assumed— had released her, but her jeans leg was snagged on the jagged hole in the boat's hull. Together, they pulled and kicked at the catching-point until, in a tearing of denim, a splintering of wood, Cassidy was free.

Tom's lungs were burning. Black spots were swimming past his eyes. He pulled Cassidy out of the dive-boat; together, they swam for the surface.

#####

Where they traded one death for another.

#####

He and Cassidy had accomplished what they'd set out, directly and indirectly, to do. She'd made the call for help, for herself and those who depended on her. Tom had had his revenge on the thing that killed Robert.

But they were battered and exhausted, and they were caught, now, in the rising tide. They could only stay afloat for so long. Tom felt the ocean surge beneath him and wondered if it might not be better to facilitate the process— his physicist's mind having one final go at analyzing the situation at hand— and breathe in a solid lungful of water before the waves smashed them against the cliff. He caught Cassidy's eye— he could barely see her, though she was no more than an arm's length away; he thought he saw her reach for him—

Something caught him by his trailing arm. Snuffled along his shoulder until it had him by the collar of his t-shirt. Something that smelled of wet dog.

Tom saw Cassidy's teeth flash as she smiled in the dark. "Hello, Book—!" she panted.

#####

It would have been wiser for him to help only one of them back to the jetty, and that one being Cassidy. But Book was more loyal than smart, and he was patient and strong in the bargain. He assisted Cassidy and Tom in turn, one by one, both of them. He hauled them clear of the cliffs and the draw of the tide, and then he acted as both life-buoy and motivator, hauling, nudging, occasionally nipping— nipping Tom, at least— until they were in sight of the jetty. He wouldn't abandon either of them. In Book's eyes, Tom realized, Tom had become one of the ones the dog loved.

Tom had replaced the loved one who had died.

#####

Book waited until they were safe at the top of the stone steps before he followed Tom and Cassidy onto the jetty. There, as they dropped onto their knees and then their backs and lay, panting, side by side, he shook a massive arc of spray from his thick coat, before settling on his belly next to Cassidy with a grunt that as much as said _Kind of a dumb night for a swim, don't you think?_

Cassidy reached to scratch Book's head. "How did you find me?"

"Are you asking me or him?" Tom asked.

"Don't be a smartass, Doctor Buckley."

Tom smiled. "I followed your light."

"What light?"

"The light from your flashlight. I could see it through the water."

"But—" Cassidy raised up on an elbow, looked down at him in wonder. From the direction of the north cliffs, Tom could hear Tulley and Matheson approaching— "Tom! Anne! Are you there—?"

"It was pitch dark in the hull," Cassidy said. "My flashlight went out when that thing grabbed me."

#####

#####

And so: rescue. But with restrictions. The personnel aboard the red Coast Guard helicopter that came for the keeper of the Crow Island light and her fellow evacuees refused to take Book.

"It's in the regulations, miss; I'm sorry," the co-pilot shouted from the open side door, above the roar of the engines. "No dogs."

"That's alright," Cassidy shouted back. "I have to stay anyway."

"Annie—" Tulley leaned forward from his seat aboard the helicopter. "He'll be fine for the night. Come on!"

She shook her head. It was, Tom realized, her mantra at this point, practically a creed: She wouldn't leave the station. She wouldn't leave her dog.

He unbuckled his seatbelt, went to climb down out of the helicopter. Matheson touched his arm. "Tom—"

Tom, standing in the downdraft from the chopper blades, turned to her and smiled reassuringly. "See you in the morning, Margaret."

#####

#####

They didn't have to turn on the fog horn, thank God. It was what Cassidy called a "clean storm." Rain, wind. No hail, no snow, no waterspouts. No mist or fog. No other surprises, either zoological or meteorological. She gave Tom more clean, dry clothing and made them something to eat while he took first crack at the shower. At the kitchen table, while Book enjoyed an extra helping of kibble from his bowl near the door, they ate tinned baked beans, toast, and black coffee. Tom wolfed it all down. He hadn't eaten since that morning, since before Devil's Island, and, now that his body had had a chance to come down from the day's adrenaline high, he was starving.

They took turns minding the light and watching the grounds; they took turns sleeping. Cassidy took first watch, with Book and Tulley's Browning, while Tom stretched out on the sofa in the living area. When Cassidy woke him ninety minutes later, he was covered in a rough green blanket, and he had a sense memory, as if from a dream, of lips pressed gently to his forehead.

#####

#####

In the morning, all was calm. The storm had cleared by five a.m., leaving nothing but a whisper of fog between the ocean and the stars.

Just after eight, Tulley and Matheson, aboard a boat— the _No Regrets—_ borrowed from Tulley's cousin, docked at Crow Island. Through the mist, Tom came down to meet them. Book was at his side.

There was something different about him, Matheson thought. He didn't quite seem like himself, but she couldn't quite say how. He looked very tired, but his face was calm. He seemed more at peace than she'd had seen him in days.

"We've been taking turns keeping watch," he told her, as Tulley tied up. "It's Anne's turn to sleep."

"Any more sign of the things?" Tulley asked. "Any of them?"

"No," Tom replied, as he led the way up to the keeper's house. "Odd how quiet it's been, with no radio, no computer, no phone."

He glanced out to sea.

_Just the water and the wind,_ Matheson thought. _And, maybe, a ghost or two_.

#####

#####

The government descended like mayflies. Not-there one second, then overrunning Devil's Island, Crow Island, and Macready's Point the next. Jumbled-up, dumb, and underfoot. Good for business if not for tourism, Frances Hollister thought, all of them needing places to stay and food to eat and at least some of 'em being smarter than the average weekend sailor with a twelve-pack of Bud revving up to get befouled in the bay or hung up on the rocks. But the folks sent by the EPA, the FBI, the DOD, and all the other acronyms proved to be as inexorable as bugs and just as mute. Hollister asked as many questions of the assorted Mulders and Scullys who set up shop in town as she needed to, to serve the formal requirements of the reports she had to file. She heard all the "That's classified, Chief; we're sorry.", "We'll let you know when we have more information.", and "Your town is not at immediate risk." as she needed to hear.

Then she turned to the real experts. Emil Sazerac and Dan Shellberg, with their respective knacks for forensics and history, offered scientific background and a theoretical framework. Dick Tulley and the others who'd been out to the islands provided observational evidence, empirical data. Together, they sussed out the mystery while the government played dumb.

From the descriptions provided by those who'd been aboard the _Fallen Angel_ and below the cliffs on Crow Island during that last storm two days back, Hollister believed, there'd been three creatures. All, Sazerac said— and those marine biologists, the Walfords (the Happer Institute suffering a temporary shortage of senior science staff) concurred— variations on the giant squid, an animal from a genus with a name like a hard sneeze— _Architeuthis, _or something to that effect— that Hollister hadn't a prayer of pronouncing. The first, the largest and most-aggressive one, the one that Tom Buckley had killed aboard the wrecked dive boat, they'd dubbed _the captain_: this monster had attacked the dive boat and the _Fallen Angel_ and, likely, Robert Buckley's Zodiac, too, killing Buckley in the process. The second beast, the one appearing broader through the body and acting less aggressive, that had brought the crab creatures to Crow Island, Hollister's brain-trust referred to as _the warrant officer_. And the third monster, smaller than the first but just as ruthless and possibly even more clever, the one that had scouted out to Macready's Point after Randy Crosley, had become _the lieutenant_.

The black crab-creatures— Dick Tulley was insisting on referring to the things as ensigns or foot-soldiers, were, at best guess, growth-accelerated members of the lobster family programmed with a love of "surface feed": newly killed meat, not carrion. Not decomposing bottom-fall and the odd minnow. Some seventy years ago, someone had taught these creatures, or their forebears, to crave fresh blood.

Making monsters to kill monsters. That had likely been the goal of the scientists that had worked on Project Croatoan in the early forties. Save the men of the merchant marine, save the brave sailors and ships of the United States Navy, save the nation itself from the seagoing predations of Nazi Germany. And, as so often happened when you mixed ambition, science, and the best of misguided intentions, the whole damn thing had gotten out of hand. By the time realization set in, it was too late: the monsters out-monstered their makers and survived.

Which left only about a thousand unanswered questions, and Frances Hollister left many of said questions to the experts. (Why, for instance, weren't there more of the squid-monsters? Asexual reproduction: that was Terry Walford's theory. Just as some sharks were capable of perpetuating themselves through something called parthenogenesis rather than laying eggs: the captain and the other squid-beasts might have come about the same way.) She settled, mainly, for pursuing answers to what she figured, for purposes of the case at hand (which was, so to say, at its core, the death of Robert Buckley), were the most relevant two.

One: Why had the captain and its followers— and the things, by the Walfords' estimation, had to be at least fourth-generation descendants of their originals— chosen now to become active?

Anne Cassidy had a thought. "The bloom," she'd said a day ago, as Hollister and Dick Tulley and their new friends from points south had helped to clean up the keeper's house on Crow Island. "The warming water. What Robert was here to—" She paused; Hollister saw her exchange a look with Tom Buckley. "What Robert was here to research: the luminescent algae. The color: that green-yellow—"

"Like the color of the marker dye in the caverns," Tom said.

"They were keying off it." Margaret Matheson paused in her dust-panning to join in. "They'd been waiting for years for a green light. And finally they got one."

Which led, indirectly but relevantly, to Hollister's question the second: Why hadn't the captain or the crab-creatures eaten Robert Buckley when they had the chance?

The final report that Emil Sazerac received from the state pathology lab regarding the black substance he'd found smeared on Robert provided the answer to that one: it was a repellent. More specifically, if the stuff, the yellow dye, filling the hundreds of ampules in the caverns on Devil's Island was meant to act as a targeting marker for enemy vessels, the black substance was intended to identify Allied or American ships as "part of the hive." After all, the squid-monsters and the crabs wouldn't be expected to attack one another.

"We might assume," Sazerac had told Hollister, and Matheson and Tom Buckley, too, yesterday morning in Hollister's office, "that the captain's killing of Robert was at least partly a mistake on its part. It attacked him and tore his arm off before it realized that he was 'one of them.'"

#####

#####

Tom Buckley said that his brother would have wanted his ashes scattered over the ocean, and that's what happened. Not that it was legal, maybe, not exactly, but on the day Robert Buckley went to his final resting-place, Frances Hollister wasn't acting as the chief of police of Macready's Point: instead, while the members of the ashes-scattering expedition headed out to sea, with Anne Cassidy and her dog Book among them, temporarily appointed assistant lighthouse keeper Hollister kept an eye on things at the Crow Island light station. Tulley was conducting the voyage aboard a boat on loan from his cousin, Pete; though Tulley's _Fallen Angel_ had been raised, patched sufficiently to keep her afloat, and towed back to Macready's Point, she still had to be dried out, retuned, and refitted. For the time being, too, the State of Maine had agreed to let the federal government have run of Crow Island, at least until those federal mayflies had had a chance to spirit away whatever was lying on the bottom near the dive boat that had sunk off the island's northern cliffs. And whatever might still be lurking in the caves beneath Devil's Island. Not to mention the rotting pile of leviathan currently stinking up the boathouse at the Happer Institute. And, maybe, while they were at it, the government's experts would be kind enough to shoot or harpoon the one sea-beast still, by the count of Tulley and his people, swimming amok in the waters off Macready's Point.

Speaking of harpooning, and those creatures who might be deserving of it: as for Dane—

_All people are worth saving, _her grandma used to say._ Not all of them are worth keeping._

Hollister sighed, looking eastward from the cleanup site below the cliffs to the dark spot that was Dick Tulley's cousin's boat, well out to sea. Big dumb toys like the Escalade were one thing. Chasing the occasional piece of tail: that was another. Messing with things that got people killed (and not only killed, but killed and eaten), things that endangered Macready's Point: that was something else entirely.

_I'm sorry, honey,_ Hollister thought, feeling a phantom weight where her wedding ring had circled her finger all those years. _Don't mean to be a bitch here. But I think I'm gonna have to draw the line at sea monsters_.

And, after all that had gone on, Anne Cassidy would be sticking around. Didn't want those government goons making a mess of the light station. Once the season was up, and the fall-to-winter keeper came to take her place, she'd head back down south, to Boston or New York, where she'd finish her schooling and get her degree. For now, she was set to lend a hand helping figure out what the Navy had unleashed into the ocean hereabouts, seventy years ago. The _what_ that had killed her boyfriend, too. With knowing comes closure: Hollister had heard words to that effect at a grief-counseling seminar for law enforcement personnel some years back. She imagined it was true.

#####

#####

They held a small wake for Robert at the keeper's house on Crow Island. A couple of the Coast Guard personnel temporarily stationed on the island drifted in, and a few of the government science and security goons, too; they mumbled shy respects to Tom, and to Cassidy, before stealing away with sandwich halves and coffee, or with slices of the marble sheet cake and twinberry pie that Nancy and Kris Patterson provided for the gathering. Tom found himself smiling slightly, surreptitiously, at Book. The dog stationed himself near the food table that they'd set up in the living area: while he let each of the Coast Guard officers pass without notice, or with a thumping wag of his tail when one of them offered him a piece of sandwich, he greeted every single one of the government agents with a quiet, rumbling growl.

#####

The morning was long gone; the afternoon was slipping by. As the sun slid toward the hills west of Macready's Point, Anne Cassidy led Tom up the spiral stairs of the Crow Island lighthouse. He'd never been up to the lamp room. They stood side by side and looked out through the clean thick glass at the whitecaps dotting the ocean, at Devil's Island, and at Gull Island, too. At the point on the horizon where sky and water met, blue on blue. Where Robert Buckley made his home.

"It's okay, Anne," Tom heard himself say. "I'm in the light."

His voice sounded different in his own ears: it was his voice, only it wasn't. Something gentler in the cadence, a softening of the New York accent he'd picked up.

Cassidy stared at him. Tom looked back at her, and suddenly his eyes weren't his own, either. He embraced her and, for a long moment, held her close, knowing what it felt like to want her, to want to comfort her. Knowing what it felt like to love her. He let his cheek come to rest against her soft dark hair, and her scent was sunshine and citrus, sandalwood and hope. Something he could carry away with him to eternity."Goodbye, sweetheart," he whispered.

Cassidy held on to him desperately, almost fiercely; a sob shook quietly through her. When she finally pulled back and looked at Tom, her eyes and his filled with tears, for a second she didn't see _him_.

But she didn't quite believe. She couldn't. Tom saw the doubt in her eyes and knew, for the first time, how it felt to be the one being debunked. _It's alright, _he wanted to tell her. Whoever he might have been, at that very moment._ I'm someplace good._ But silence descended on him, engulfed him, bringing with it a helplessness as encompassing and cold as the waves below the north cliffs—

_I love you, Anne. I'll always love you._

Tom might have been drowning. His mouth opened, but he couldn't speak. As if the wanting and his body were the property of two different entities. He could do nothing but stand and gaze at Anne Cassidy as if from a great and uncrossable distance and pray she could see the love in his eyes—

In the end, he realized, he would never know.

Cassidy's brows drew together; Tom saw her swallow. Saw her trying not to look away. "Thank you, Tom," she said. She smiled for him. Bravely, he thought. "But you got one thing wrong." Her right hand reached out; her fingertips traced the line of his left cheek. Her dark eyes calmly studied the path of the tracing. "He wouldn't have said goodbye."

#####

Just before four o' clock, Tom and Matheson left Crow Island.

Tulley had his cousin's boat nearly a mile out when Tom finally turned to look back. But Cassidy had left the jetty, and Tom couldn't see her on the path leading the long way around, up past the island's spare but stalwart stand of firs, to the northern cliffs. She and Book had gone either back to the keeper's house or to the lighthouse, the lamp ever in need of tending.

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Tom Buckley was sleeping, his head resting between his shoulder and the passenger window of the Bonneville. The waning sunlight caught in his long eyelashes; even just glancing over, Matheson could see. They'd be back in New York well after nightfall. But, really, for all the grief she normally gave Tom regarding who she preferred to be at the wheel of her car, she didn't mind driving in the dark. The Moody Blues were playing softly on the stereo; in his eternally romantic baritone, Justin Hayward was singing of love long lost. Matheson smiled, reliving, in her mind, her parting from Dick Tulley: at the docks, he'd done the old-fashioned thing, the best of boldest things, too, and hauled her in and kissed her, leaving Matheson, gloriously weak in the knees, with her arms wrapped around his neck. "Been meaning to do that since the minute we met," he'd said. "I've been wishing you would," Matheson had replied, completely unashamed of the blush on her cheeks or the stammer in her voice.

She'd had final words with Anne Cassidy, too, before Tulley brought her and Tom back to Macready's Point. Anne might finish her degree at Stony Brook; she might finish it elsewhere. Matheson imagined the final fact of the matter was one to which she'd never be privy: after all, a fourth-year oceanography student wasn't apt to need credits in psychology. Or, for that matter, in physics. Matheson glanced again, affectionately, at Tom, the ethereal peace in his freshly cleanshaven face, and steered the Bonneville toward home.

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**THE END**


End file.
